Transcending the Adaptation/Mitigation Climate Change Science Policy Debate: Unmasking Assumptions about Adaptation and Resilience

The two principal policy approaches to global climate change include mitigation and adaption. In recent years, the interest in adaptation and “resilience” has increased significantly in part because anthropogenic climate change appears unavoidable and mitigation agreements are difficult to achieve. This article takes a critical look at the emerging discourse over climate change adaptation and resilience. By drawing upon critiques of environmental resource management and adaptive comanagement, this paper argues that taking the concept of adaptation for granted as an appropriate bottom-up strategy for coping with anthropogenic climate change not only ignores the political and economic contexts in which this environmental strategy developed, but might also unintentionally subvert the vulnerable communities it intends to benefit. Using an ethnographic case study of the 2004 Boscastle Harbour flood in North Cornwall, England, this paper explores the paradoxical way in which adaptation and resilience work within the apparatus of the neoliberal state, which aims to shift responsibility for social and environmental problems to the individual. By better understanding the political and economic processes embedded in the concepts of adaptation and resilience, researchers will be more effective at finding equitable solutions to human ecological problems. Adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change is vital in order to reduce the impacts of climate change that are happening now and increase resilience to future impacts (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).