Approach of this guidance
The above listed guidelines exhibit a couple of limitations.
- Each guideline focuses on a particular aspect of
adaptation. The IPCC technical guidelines focus on impact, the
risk management on decision making, the
community-based guidelines on building adaptive capacity.
There is no comprehensive guideline that includes all of these
perspectives.
- There is no guideline on which framing would be appropriate
in which situation. Adaptation situations are diverse. No
single approach is applicable.
- With the exception of the risk governance framework, the
institutional aspects of CCVIA have not been taken into
account. Experiences from adaptation practice, as well as the
emerging literature on adaption barriers show, however,
that understanding existing institutions and designing
appropriate “adapted” institutions are
often the bottlenecks of delivering adaptation on the ground.
- There is a gap between the broad and general concepts such
as adaptive capacity and vulnerability and the specific
methods that make these concepts operational.
- There is a lack of case examples that come along with these
guidelines.
This guideline addresses the above-mentioned limitations by:
- emphasising the diversity of adaptation situations
considered as well as the diversity of approaches and methods
needed;
- offering guidance on which method are appropriate in a
given adaptation situations; and
- connecting the guidelines with examples cases.
These guidelines place a particular emphasis on problem framing.
Adaptation problems are often difficult to pin down because
they exhibit features of so-called “wicked
problems” (Rittel and Webber, 1973): Adaptation involves many
actors with different interests at various levels of decision making.
There is often no clear agreement about what exactly the adaptation
problem is; different people involved frame the problem differently.
There is also uncertainty and ambiguity as to how improvements might be
made; and the problem is potentially unlimited in terms of the time and
resources it could absorb.
In the past, not enough emphasis has been placed on problem-formulation
in the field of CCIVA. This is probably the legacy of the (early) IPCC
work, which focused on mitigation and global impact assessment. In this
context, only a narrow range of global problems revolving around the
following three questions were addressed: i) what level of climate
change is to expect; ii) how dangerous are the consequences of these
levels; and iii) which mitigation targets are necessary to avoid these
dangerous consequences. In the meantime, a stronger focus on adaptation
has emerged and a much wider array of questions at all scales is
addressed. This shift in focus has, however, been insufficiently
reflected in the terminology and methodology used.
Furthermore, problem formulation has been predominantly driven by
research rather than by stakeholders who are directly involved in the
problem. Obviously, for adaptation research to be practically relevant,
stakeholder-driven formulation of problems is essential. Moreover,
solving adaptation problems requires collaboration between researchers
and stakeholder in all three phases of the problem solving process.
Designing such collaboration is by no means trivial and it seems that
little research conducted under the flag of solving
“real-world” problems turns out to be practically
useful in the end (e.g., Weichselgartner and Kasperson, 2010).
