21 Why the discursive environment matters
The UK Climate Impacts Programme and adaptation to climate change
Introduction
This chapter discusses the UK Climate Impacts Programme’s problematization of adaptation to climate change, which both responds to and helps shape a discursive “environment” through which adaptation to climate change is understood. It also discusses the extent to which this might be characterized in terms of human security. Although human security is often said to be threatened by climate change as a biophysical phenomenon (Barnett and Adger, 2007), the understanding of climate change as a threat is discursively produced (Shackley and Wynne, 1995; Demeritt, 2001, 2006; Szerszynski, 2010), as is our understanding of security in relation to it (Campbell, 1998; Dalby, 2002; Feindt and Oels, 2005; O’Brien et al., 2007). As such, rather than directly negotiating the changes in the biophysical environment, humans understand and respond to environmental change, including climate change, through discourse.
These discourses can be understood as themselves creating a “conceptual environment” that reveals some ontological inclusions and obscures others and in doing so exposes particular avenues of visibility and spaces for action, while other paths remain concealed. In doing so, this conceptual environment shapes how current and future actors understand and respond to climate change. As such, understanding climate change requires not just an understanding of the biophysical phenomenon, but also a critical awareness of the structuring and limiting effects of established discourses, including the discursive interventions produced through adaptation policy and advice. Without this awareness, our capacity to conceptualize and respond to the problem of climate change critically and perhaps more effectively will also be limited. This chapter offers a conceptual line of enquiry into the way in which this discursive environment is emerging in regard to climate change adaptation in the United Kingdom through the work of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP).
Theoretical basis: why the discursive environment matters for adaptation and human security
Although they use different terminology, O’Brien and colleagues (2007) have described this process of problematization in the field of vulnerability to climate change. They observe that there appear to be two alternative conceptual “framings” of vulnerability and discuss how these shape policy. The first framing sees vulnerability as an outcome of the impacts of climate change. This is based on a scientific framing which has an ontology and epistemology that focuses on the technical and physical aspects of climate change, entailing policies based on empirical, physical and linear responses. The second, human security framing, understands vulnerability through an ontology that is sensitive to the social production of norms and contingency, arising from the context of the community or individual that responds to climate change. This relocates the problem of climate change in the social realm, entailing a policy response that seeks to build social capacity in a broad sense. This framing is linked to a broader critical discourse of environmental change that in turn draws on poststructuralist accounts of the contingency of knowledge and power relations in social systems (O’Brien et al., 2007; Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007).
More recently, Pelling (2011) has accounted for adaptation discourse as divided into three general frames of resilience, transition and transformation. These also have their specific ontologies and epistemologies, but Pelling’s insight is that their principal distinction is the difference in their core “intention and action” (Pelling, 2011: 170). With regard to resilience, this intention and action is geared towards ensuring the continuation of the existing state of affairs; for transition it is to enable improvement within the existing framework of social relations; for transformation it is the willingness to critically engage with and potentially transgress the limits of that framework itself. Each of these frames offers consecutive improvements in their traction on social systems, including their political systems, economic structures, and cultural norms. Pelling situates human security within the last of these frames: identifying it as one of the adaptation discourses offering the most critical purchase on social systems, enabling a greater depth to the understanding and practice of adaptation and therefore enabling the possibility of transformation.
The division between the scientific and human security framing of vulnerability, and between different forms of adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation, calls into question the specific ontological and epistemic inclusions in UKCIP’s account of adaptation as well as the “intention and action” that forms its political rationale. This is particularly important as these tensions in the wider discursive field appear to have been internalized within UKCIP’s discourse (Oppermann, 2011). This calls for an analysis of how UKCIP’s problematization of adaptation has responded to and resolved these external discourses, and what this means for its content and coherence.
In order to analyze UKCIP’s account of adaptation, it is necessary to establish a theoretical approach. Seeing discourse as an important object of study in its own right is based on the assumption that meaning is not so much referenced by language as produced by it (Potter, 2001). Agreed or general norms about language-use and connected technologies of intervention thus produce an accepted system of knowledge or “system of representation” about a referent object (Foucault, 1998; Hall, 2001: 72). This system can be characterized as a “problematization,” where an account of a problem and solution are formed through the use of a particular ontology and epistemology and are linked through a political rationale that sanctions certain practices and politics in order to produce a desired outcome (Campbell, 1998; Foucault, 1998; Flynn, 2005). This creates a particular understanding of a topic that both implicitly and explicitly excludes other, alternative conceptualizations as invisible, irrelevant, false, and even immoral (Dijk, 2001; Jäger, 2001).
A level of linguistic precision is added to the concept of problematization through the account of its structure as the “articulation” of conceptual “elements” as “moments” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). The specific manner of their articulation is accounted for through various linguistics-based discourse analysis techniques (including those of Titscher et al., 2000; Wodak and Meyer, 2001). This framework is used here to critically analyze a technical report produced in 2003 by UKCIP, which formed the basis of their account of adaptation. This analysis has formed the starting point for a wider investigation of their discourse between 2003 and 2011, although there is only room to cover the text-based elements here.
At the level of a document, discourse analysis techniques can be used to critically review how this is narratively, rhetorically and semantically constructed (Dijk, 2001; Wetherell et al., 2001). Crucially, this makes visible the content and also the contingency of such articulations, opening the discourse up to critique (Jäger, 2001; Wertsch, 2001), and indeed to the possibility of strategic discursive change should this demonstration of the contingency of content be utilized normatively to further specific parts of the discourse, although this is not the intention of this chapter.
During this research, it became apparent that existing discursive tensions were often resolved through the use of a conceptual “supplement” which was linguistically articulated to the problematization in a manner which appears to extend the discourse, yet which at the same time acts as a “limit point” (Derrida, 1976: 145), through the nature of its articulation as subsidiary or additional to the original or core problematization. However, its very presence nonetheless undermines the coherence of the core problematization and thus intimates the possibility of discursive change (Torfing, 1999; Wertsch, 2001; Hansen, 2006). It is for this reason Derrida refers to the supplement as “dangerous” (Derrida, 1976: 163).
The next section will demonstrate the use of this discourse analysis approach in critically analyzing UKCIP’s problematization of adaptation, beginning with a discussion of the discourse’s founding moments of articulation in UKCIP’s technical report Climate Adaptation: Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-making (Willows and Connell, 2003).
The discursive landscape: UKCIP’s core problematization of adaptation
In seeking to account for a problematization, the first port of call is often the definition of what is assumed to be the core referent, in this case: adaptation. In UKCIP’s technical report there is no overt account of what substantively constitutes adaptation. Instead, a definition of climate adaptation is offered in the glossary at the end, where adaptation is defined as the “process or outcome of a process that leads to a reduction in harm or risk of harm, or realization of benefits associated with climate variability and climate change …” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 111). What kind of process or outcome ensures a reduction of harm is not explicitly stated, nor is it defined inversely by an account of what constitutes harm. Whilst this abstract openness is common in definition writing, it combines with the absence of a definition in the beginning of the report to leave a gap in substantive meaning. In the context of a technical report, a genre usually characterized by precision and certitude, adaptation as a term is then implicitly and inevitably filled and shaped by association as it is used throughout the text of the report (Johnstone, 2008). It is this process of articulation which will be considered here.
The introductory “Context” section of the report is particularly important in providing adaptation with a substantive meaning by situating it within a persuasive narrative. First, the claim is made that there is certainty that climate change is happening, but that “the exact extent and nature of changes in our climate remains uncertain.” This is elaborated a little, then followed by the statement: “Climate therefore represents a changing source of risk. Climate adaptation is about recognizing these altered risks …” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 3). Thus, climate adaptation is immediately articulated to the concept of uncertainty and risk. Crucially, the word choice in these sentences frames climate change as being a manageable problem in a series of subtle ways. The use of the phrase “exact extent” qualifies the meaning of “uncertainty,” implying that uncertainty is limited to details rather than substantial uncertainties about the type or magnitude of threat. Similarly, the use of the term “altered,” implies that changes to the climate are minor. This diminutive account of the problem is coupled with a lexis that gives the impression that knowledge of climate change through risk is easily accessible: this occurs through the use of the authoritative term “recognizing.” Thus we see already that through these opening moments of articulation, climate change is problematized as a threat of limited uncertainty, which is resolved through risk. As the only included epistemology, cast in such accessible terms, risk is produced as the core epistemology in the problematization of adaptation.
The sentence continues: “Climate adaptation is about recognizing these altered risks, and taking decisions that allow the likely impacts to be reduced or managed, and the opportunities to be exploited” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 3). Here, the first “and” between “risks” and “taking decisions” implies a simple transition from knowing the problem through risk to the production of a solution, in the form of a “decision.” This introductory sequence thus implicitly establishes a core rationale in which utilizing risk as the means of knowing the uncertainty of climate change claims to provide a straightforward basis for decisions that constitute successful adaptation.
Taken together, these opening statements present a problematization of adaptation that appears to be logical, sufficient and therefore true. Appearing in such a simple and concise form implicitly establishes a definition which leaves no overt space for critical reading, and as such helps to “lock in” this interpretation in the mind of the reader (Johnstone, 2008) before they go on to read the technical detail of the report. This is significant because the coherence and hence validity of this problematization is later undermined in two ways: first, through more tentative and limited claims about the availability of risk-based knowledge, and second, through supplementary concepts that add to but also exceed the risk-based core problematization. Excluding such openness and supplementary concepts, this initial narrative functions to “cover over” the cracks in the conceptual edifice of the problematization of adaptation, allowing it to be resilient in the face of contradictory evidence (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Glynos and Howarth, 2007). As we shall see in the following sections, this stabilizing narrative allows the supplement to introduce elements from different framings of adaptation into the discourse without destabilizing the problematization.
The conceptual elements articulated as moments in this problematization of adaptation can be examined through three related facets. First, what ontology or imaginary of the world, its contents and forces, does the report account for or assume? Intimately related to this is the second facet: what is its epistemology, or how does it characterize knowing? Third, based on these foundational claims, what understanding of agency or action is assumed to be necessary to secure adaptation, and what overall political rationale mobilizes these practices, including the values or ethics that explain them? These are discussed below, together with examples of supplementary moments.
Ontology and epistemology
The narrative described above clearly identifies risk as the epistemology of adaptation. In doing so, other types of knowledge are implicitly excluded. This establishment of risk enables the overt exclusion of the social as both a mode of knowing and as an object of knowledge. In fact, the report expends just one sentence to the claim that, comparatively to climate, social change is unknowable (Willows and Connell, 2003: 50) in a manner that dismisses it as a valid object of adaptation discourse or as a basis for a technology of knowledge. This demonstrates significant parallels with the outcome-based scientific framing identified by O’Brien and colleagues (2007) within climate change vulnerability discourse.
However, several supplementary moments disrupt the dominant epistemology, particularly where the report provides various technical means to cover the gaps in knowing uncertainty left by probabilistic risk (see, for example, Willows and Connell, 2003: 70–87). One instance is the use of the concept of “adaptive management” as the constant reassessment of risk (Willows and Connell, 2003: 53), a measure that only makes sense under the ontological and epistemological assumption that there is a limited capacity for prescient and hence preemptive knowledge of how to adapt to climate change. This indicates a supplementary epistemology more akin to a systems-based frame that assumes irreducible uncertainty or ignorance as a condition (Luhmann, 1998). In the report, however, adaptive management calls for the reapplication of the risk-based framework at greater frequencies, rather than changing the epistemology of adaptation per se (Willows and Connell, 2003: 71). As such, it reinstates a risk-based means of knowing as the solution to its own insufficiency in dealing with deep uncertainty, and excludes alternative means of knowing that respond to this irreducible uncertainty, such as the human security approach based on knowing the contextual vulnerability of the social system (O’Brien et al., 2007). Interestingly, since 2003 this supplementary epistemology has come to play an increasing role in UKCIP’s approach through the introduction of the Local Climate Impacts Profile methodology (UK Climate Impacts Programme, 2009).
The risk-based epistemology has several ontological implications. First, in order to identify a risk, it is necessary for a potential event be described, and thus not only defined but also rendered as a finite or delimited object as a result. Second, the practice of risk assessment assumes that the identity, norms or values of the organization is consistent or at least predictable, in order to project them into the future to enable the risk assessment process to rank risks in their order of magnitude of effects on the organization (Oppermann, 2011). This outcome-based account of risk thereby centralizes the accounts of actors and agency through the demands of predictive knowledge. This ontology is exacerbated by the almost exclusive use of the singular noun “decision-maker” to define the subject that acts in the problematization produced in the report. The core problematization thus establishes an ontology that delimits and centralizes the social in both time and space, enabling a linear understanding of identity, norms and values, as well as of response capacity. In the assumption of the validity of prescient knowledge and the related occlusion of concern for the observation and utilization of social capacities and networks, the core ontology in operation in UKCIP’s problematization again has clear resonances with the scientific framing of responses to climate change as outcome-based, linear, and structured by knowledge of externally originating risk (O’Brien et al., 2007).
However, there are several supplementary moments which appear linguistically as details and caveats in the body of the report which extend the core problematization, yet which also intimate a conflicting ontology of actors and agency. “Decision-makers,” for example, are recognized as located amongst “stakeholders” or in groups with shared interests or roles such as “sectors” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 66). This indicates a supposition that an organization’s achievement of its objectives is to some extent dependent on relations with other actors, and implies an ontology of networked connections rather than discrete objects populating the ontological imaginary, and as such enables a more distributed account of the agency of decision-making, which resonates with the human security framing of contextual vulnerability. However, the character of these relations is not a focus of knowledge in the report and as such does not disrupt its core problematization, keeping these elements articulated as supplementary moments through the failure to investigate them or present them as central concerns.
The dominance of the predictive, outcome-based epistemology, and the centralized ontology of actors and agency, is reflected in the political rationale of adaptation established by the report. The most direct account of what adaptation “is” lies in the concept of “decision-making” itself, where the basis of those decisions, which we can call its politics, is for the most part left to risk assessment on the basis of the “objectives of the decision-maker” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 53), implying a laissez-faire, neoliberal politics for the report’s account of adaptation as a whole. This assumes that the right to act is limited to a single decision-maker. In doing so it centralizes practices and the political in social space and occludes the agency and value of other actors, and the nature of their relations to one another, as both enabling and enacting the decision as part of the problematization of adaptation.
Practices and politics are also represented as centralized in time throughout the document through the collocation of decision with “the” or “a,” marking decision-making as occurring in a single instance or moment. This usage obscures the absence of a substantial discussion of the politics or practices of the processes involved before and after this moment. It also creates a political imperative to make the “best” decision possible at the moment of decision, which drives a political ideal of perfect knowledge of the risk, and implies that a single person in a single moment can find a single or right answer. This occlusion of wider, emergent processes tends to support a linear sense of politics and practice, drawing the techno-scientific, risk-based problematization full circle.
Despite the profusion of such examples in the report, there are some attempts to avoid the limitations of a linear approach. These act as a supplementary conceptual basis for the problematization of adaptation. Post-decision review and iterative decision-making, under the rubric of “adaptive management,” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 71) suggest that it is not just the moment of decision or the accuracy of what is decided that matters, but instead places value on making decisions frequently. This implicitly responds to the ontology of uncertainty as an irreducible condition rather than as a temporary obstacle that can be controlled by the preemptive technologies of risk-based decision-making.
Moreover, the practice of review as a continual process of making decisions entails that the process itself, rather than the decisions it produces, becomes the central political rationale of adaptation. This resonates with the strong focus on social capacity, rather than precise outcomes, within the human security account of adaptation to climate change and the related account of adaptation as transformation.
However, post-decision review and iterative decision-making have a limited impact on the report’s core problematization of adaptation. The iterative review process, although it is noted in the introduction to the report, gets very limited substantiation in the main body of the report and does not appear as an inherent part of the practices it describes. Indeed, its location at the end of the report represents it as post-script both physically and conceptually (Willows and Connell, 2003: 39–40). Moreover, the process of reviewing decisions, although described as “continuous,” is also coupled with the phrase “best decision at each decision point” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 30). This implies that the core techno-scientific ontology, which enables certainty, remains in the interim periods of the adaptation process and as such does not dislodge a prescient and preemptive rationale of adaptation.
However, a powerful supplementary moment occurs in the ideal of “keeping options open” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 30). This expresses an ideal of making a decision that maintains flexibility for future decisions and in doing so implies the need for a practice and politics that can respond to an epistemology and temporal ontology of irreducible uncertainty by ensuring flexibility. This sensitivity to systemic links in time is mirrored by a sensitivity to a systemic ontology of social space. Here the supplementary principle of flexibility appears in the request to avoid “adaptation constraining decisions” (Willows and Connell, 2003: 11); that is, to avoid decisions that negatively affect others. As such, both of these supplementary moments place value on ensuring that the process of making decisions is continual, broad and flexible.
Together, these supplementary moments proffer an alternative rationale, where flexibility becomes the basis of enabling good adaptation decisions, which are open and emergent. Although not mentioned in any detail, this would tend to assume the creation and maintenance of strong communication and cooperation abilities, which again has strong parallels with the human security focus on social capacity (Folke et al., 2002; Pelling et al., 2008; Adey and Anderson, 2011; McCormack and Schwanen, 2011). Such supplementary moments thus undermine the centralized politics of individualized “objectives” overtly discussed in the report (Willows and Connell, 2003: 53) and reduce the imperative to create risk-based certainty in order to make the best decision.
However, while “keeping options open” and “avoiding adaptation constraining decisions” are noted relatively strongly in the document, they are not connected into the political rationale as an essential process or outcome, nor to any overt or detailed ontology or epistemology. As such, although they appear to extend the problematization of adaptation, they do not make any substantive changes, particularly at the level of the core political rationale of making the best decision at each decision point as predetermined by the organization.
Implications for human security
Human security is not part of UKCIP’s discourse, nor is it the intention of this chapter to use any of the normative claims of human security to critique UKCIP’s discourse of adaptation. However, in the spirit of ethical critique (Glynos and Howarth, 2007), it is pointed out that while UKCIP’s core problematization occludes key principles of human security, the supplementary moments discussed above do in fact resonate with certain elements of human security’s ontology, epistemology, and to a lesser extent, its political rationale.
Emerging relatively recently, human security is characterized as a vast “agglomerate of interconnected concepts” (Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007: 235) that draws on several other disciplinary backgrounds. Although varied, these concepts all link to a central normative principle of protecting human wellbeing through enabling agency and capacity at the community and individual level, rather than at the level of the state. In doing so, the ontology of security, and of adaptation to climate change if understood in this frame, is expanded to include overt ethical engagement with security issues of the human, but most importantly through taking the individual as the referent object of security and making systemic capacity the political rationale for achieving this (Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007).
Crucially this problematization requires an epistemology capable of registering the complex power-relations within political, economic and social structures which enable individual wellbeing, agency, and capacity (O’Brien et al., 2007; O’Brien and Leichenko, 2007). This concern moves the imaginary of the threat of climate change from biophysical change and direct impacts to “the dynamic social context” through which these impacts emerge and come to have meaning (O’Brien and Leichenko, 2007: 2). In short, climate change and adaption emerge as a problem and solution through the degree of individual and wider capacity and agency within that system. This has led to a willingness to critically assess existing norms and governance structures and engage in transformational agendas, bringing into focus the ontology of the system that adapts and its potential rationales for securing such a system (Pelling, 2011), making it both the subject and object of adaptation.
This ontology and epistemology are in stark contrast to the limited account of the social in UKCIP’s problematization of adaptation, particularly with regard to the internal nature of organizations and the complete occlusion of the individual. Rather, for UKCIP the extant objectives of administrative and business units determines the referent object of security. At best, a wider account of social systems appears when it notes the need to consider an organization’s situation in wider regional networks, but it does not call for internal analysis of organizational structure or organizational change, let alone individual agency. Such an account of the subject is conservative rather than transformative, and in this sense does not fit with human security’s willingness to engage with individual agency or norms of governance.
These supplementary moments do however resonate with human security’s ontology of time, as it “allows for a continuum from prevention to emergency” (Tadjbaksh and Chenoy, 2007: 235). Here the supplementary moment that calls for keeping options open shares this understanding of time as emergent. Since 2003, UKCIP’s increased use of the Local Climate Impacts Profile (UK Climate Impacts Programme, 2009) has increased the presence of this ontology of time through its methodological focus on organizational experience which shifts the time-frame of adaptation to a smaller scale relevant to individual and organizational practices, rather than long-term objectives. From a human security perspective then, it is important to note that UKCIP’s supplementary ontological and epistemic moments and their political rationales have become increasingly distinct since 2003, and have begun to develop in a direction more sympathetic to the concerns of human security.
The UKCIP problematization of adaptation appears to have reached a moment of crisis in 2010–2011, when its coherence was undermined and overtly called into question. This was demonstrated in publications by UKCIP in 2010 and 2011 (Lonsdale et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2011) which introduced a much more thorough account of the supplementary moments articulated into an alternative problematization of adaptation with their own political rationale. Importantly, these documents established the centrality of social systems, and particularly internal organizational structure, for adaptation. In doing so they introduced new epistemologies and rationales of communication, decision-making and action that are sensitive to social practices and norms and to irreducible uncertainty, including the critique of the scientific framing by Dessai and Hulme (Hulme and Dessai, 2008; Dessai et al., 2009; Brown et al., 2011). Furthermore, these new concerns overtly connected to existing alternative literatures on adaptive capacity building, specifically at the organizational level. This radically opens up the potential of these supplementary moments, and indeed of the nascent supplementary problematization, to be dangerous in Derrida’s sense of supplanting the core problematization and the practices that are called for as a result.
However, while these documents bolstered the presence of the supplementary moments, the precise nature of their articulation nonetheless curtailed their effect on UKCIP’s core problematization. The 2010 document offered these alternative accounts to national climate change risk assessment, but did not relate them back to UKCIP’s own practices directly. As such they remained supplementary in the sense of being additional, rather than supplanting. The second document, which was UKCIP’s final public guidance in 2011 and which is fittingly referred to as “supplementary guidance” (Brown et al., 2011: 9) was held in check in a similar fashion. Nonetheless, it creates a clear alternative to the core problematization from 2003, designating it as a “top-down approach” to be contrasted with a vulnerability-based “bottom-up approach.” In doing so, it nonetheless points out the limitations of a vulnerability approach in accounting for adaptation, and ties it back into the need for a techno-scientific approach that limits the appearance of adaptive capacity as an alternative referent of a political rationale for adaptation. In sum, although this last document is beginning to take social conditions on board more generally, it has yet to change UKCIP’s political rationale accordingly, thereby retaining the core problematization.
This unresolved status of the emerging supplementary problematization leaves a large question mark over the future of adaptation in the UK as it shifts to a new institutional structure for the provision of adaptation support. October 2011 marked the end of UKCIP’s role as the core provider of adaptation advice on behalf of the UK government, which has now been made the responsibility of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency (UK Climate Impacts Programme, 2011). The Environment Agency’s historical disciplinary focus lay in the techno-scientific or impacts-based problematization, and as such it is a concern that this institutional re-embedding has the potential to undermine the growth of the supplementary problematization. By contrast, the EA’s decision to continue UKCIP’s work with regional climate change partnerships (Defra Adapting to Climate Change Programme team, 2012; Environment Agency, 2012) provides a potentially sympathetic mode of practice for the supplementary moments identified here. This period of transition has provided a clear opportunity for the reproblematization of adaptation, particularly under the auspices of the Adaptation Sub-Committee to which the 2010 report was submitted. Further research is now needed to see whether and how the supplementary moments emerged, and if they were enabled to produce a transformational account of adaptation in substantive terms, or whether they have receded, to be replaced by a resilient or at best transitional problematization of adaptation that is conservative in its political rationale.
Conclusion
This chapter has tried to demonstrate that far from being a purely biophysical phenomenon, the very understanding and communication of adaptation itself is a discursive “environment.” The particular inclusions and exclusions and their articulation as either as substantive or supplementary moments forms a specific problematization of adaptation, a terrain that must be understood and negotiated, and opened up where it is closed off. Indications of these new paths occur in the supplementary moments that offer caveats, alternatives and clarifications to the core problematization. In doing so, these moments are “dangerous” and act as immanent points of potentiality; if the avenues they indicate were followed through, the supplementary problematization they entail would create a very different discourse, one which resonates with the problematization of adaptation put forward by the human security framing.
UKCIP’s discourse of adaptation has been explored through the foundation established by the report published in 2003, Climate Adaptation: Risk, Uncertainty and Decision-making (Willows and Connell, 2003). This analysis has demonstrated how the report’s core problematization was based on a scientific ontology and epistemology, which both shapes and limits the way in which adaptation is problematized. Here we see the threat is understood through outcome-based risk assessment, which is used as enabling preemptive decisions as the solutions, such that adaptation happens in relatively discrete, linear steps by discrete, unchanging and abstract actors.
However, this core problematization has been increasingly marked by supplementary moments, which both extend the core problematization and fracture its coherence. In the case of UKCIP, the articulation of these supplements as moments within the discourse enabled the inclusion of a more comprehensive account of society and social forms of knowledge (Oppermann, 2011), and have gradually brought the social into view as the subject that adapts. Crucially, the 2010 document also made the jump to identifying the social system not only as the subject that adapts but also as the object that is adapted to climate change, through the recognition of internal organizational structures and qualities, and as such indicating alternative political rationales of adaptation based on building flexible capacity in the face of irreducible uncertainty.
These supplementary moments resonate with the concerns of a human security framing of adaptation to climate change, particularly where human security is understood in terms of the shift from an apolitical or post-political techno-scientific account that occludes critical engagement with social systems and norms, to a concern for the shape and values of human systems and particularly the rationales that produce their mode of governance, with the practical focus on social capacity (O’Brien et al., 2007; O’Brien and Leichenko, 2007).
This analysis of UKCIP’s discourse has intended to perform the function of ethical critique in opening up this particular discursive “environment” in order to enable critical engagement with an established conceptual terrain, making visible its contents and contours, and its resulting limits and potentialities. It has done this through identifying the ontological and epistemic inclusions and exclusions and political rationale that articulates these. It has also used Derrida’s account of the supplement to demonstrate the crucial nuances of articulation that enable a concept to be apparently included but with little substantive effect, thus whilst introducing conceptual potential these also act as limit points. Such critical analysis of the discursive problematization of adaptation is particularly important at a time of change for the actors and institutions involved in the (re) production of the problematization of adaptation to climate change in the UK, as it provides an opportunity for the critical function of the supplement to be overtly and substantively engaged with, and notes that its dangerousness is itself in danger of being lost, due to its lack of codification within UKCIP’s core problematization before its role was returned to Defra and the Environment Agency.
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