The Challenge of Governing Adaptation in Australia

Adaptation to climate change is work in progress. The focus of much adaptation research, policy, and practice is on reducing the “adaptation deficit” of the highly vulnerable in the developing world (Moser and Ekstrom 2010). Nevertheless, developed countries, although assumed to have a high adaptive capacity, are still evolving the institutions to govern and guide adaptation. The relative youth of these institutions, along with the novelty of adaptation as an object of governance, undoubtedly influences the lack of coordination and purpose noted in many developed country adaptation strategies. Indeed, if strategy is defined as the “pattern in a stream of decisions,” then current adaptation activities in many developed countries cannot yet be regarded as strategic (Mintzberg 1978; Narayanan et al. 2011). This lack of strategic adaptation, even in developed countries, reinforces the view that having a high adaptive capacity is a necessary, but not sufficient determinant of action (Adger and Barnett 2009; Burch 2009; Tompkins et al. 2010). This chapter describes and analyzes adaptation policy in Australia and shows how insights from the organizational change literature can serve as a useful bridge between current technical-rational approaches to decision making that assume policies develop in a linear manner, and alternative adaptive models for addressing social change processes. The following section argues that adaptation is best thought of as a process of change – as opposed to a set of definitive outcomes – and it describes four key elements of such a change process: Scoping, readiness, implementation, and monitoring. These four elements provide a framework for assessing the nature of adaptation policy in Australia. The second section describes the content and direction of adaptation policy in Australian jurisdictions. The third section assesses the extent to which those policies that specifically sought to affect adaptation have indeed achieved meaningful change. The chapter concludes by considering the importance of creating shared meaning and purpose for adaptation as well as the dangers of force fitting adaptation processes into prevailing models of decision making and change management. Adaptation: From Outcomes to Processes For the purposes of this chapter, adaptation is understood as a higher-order concept that describes the processes of change that improve the anticipated fit of a socioecological system to its most probable climate futures.