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Characteristics of organisational adaptive capacity
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7 short descriptions
As well as describing what course of action delivers good adaptation, it is also useful to consider what attributes make an organisation or sector or network well-placed to identify opportunities, muster resources, capture expertise, create partnerships and opportunities for dialogue and manage and monitor the processes required to undertake those actions as these are the attributes that enable it to have a high adaptive capacity. Lists of attributes on their own are of little use especially as many of the concepts used, though sounding good, have many potential interpretations and do not give sufficient specific detail to explain how they might be used. Many of the attributes that sound unarguable on paper (e.g. ‘there should be good stakeholder engagement throughout the process’) may be fantastically difficult to do well, especially if the team has little experience of group dynamics and who has power etc. There are a number of frameworks available, most developed through practice, that explore what is means to be well adapting and how you assess it in an organisational or sectoral context.

A survey of seventeen recent studies and framings of adaptive capacity was undertaken by UKCIP, focusing specifically on aspects that enable an organisation (or occasionally another unit of exploration e.g. a national adaptation plan or a network) to be ‘well adapting’ (Lonsdale, et al 2010). There were a number of commonly cited attributes across the frameworks and the following questions summarise the key areas for building adaptive capacity in an organisation (or network or other level of organisation) identified in this report.
  1. Does the organisation have leadership that understands and promotes adaptation?
  2. Does the organisation have access to or know where to access, accurate, usable information and expertise?
  3. Is there space to translate the information throughout the organisation?
  4. Are novel projects, experiments, opportunities for innovation (and the individuals promoting them) supported?
  5. Does the organisation customarily engage with others through collaboration or in partnerships and is attention paid to how this collaboration can be done well and improved as required?
  6. Is adaptation integrated into the organisation’s processes and practices?
  7. Are there regular opportunities for questioning core assumptions of how the organisation works and its core purpose?
  8. Does the organisation have a culture of continuous learning? Are there systems in place for the retention of knowledge and experience within the organisation when key individuals leave?

Exemplary methods and tools

Examples of frameworks of organisational adaptive capacity
NameDescriptionReferences
PACT: Performance
Acceleration through
Capacity Transformations,
Alexander Ballard Ltd.		A framework tool for diagnosis, assessment, monitoring and evaluation at multiple scales - team, organisation sector, network, nation. 'Reviewing the Dutch Government's National Adaptation Strategy 'the PACT approach was inspirational in the way it could so rapidly provide a clearly structured analysis of our complex adaptation programme' Senior Manager in the Netherlands Climate Adaptation Programme. It can be used in many ways including self-assessment. Developed by practising managers and leading experts, PACT is used for many purposes, ranging from reviews of single organisations to programmes at national government level. The standard expert-based assessment process provides customised reports that supports organisations to move straight from assessing the status of current work programmes to planning improvements.http://www.pact.co/home
Eight determinants of
Adaptive Capacity,
Gary Yohe and Richard Tol		An academic paper that describes and approach to assess the potential contribution of various adaptation options to improving systems coping capacities by focusing on the underlying determinants of adaptive capacity. The authors suggest that the method developed should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate diverse applications whose contexts are location specific and path dependent without imposing the straightjacket constraints of a ‘one size fits all’ approach. The method should produce unitless indicators that can be employed to judge the relative vulnerabilities of diverse systems to multiple stresses and to their potential interactions. An artificial application was used to describe the development of the method and to illustrate how it might be applied. Some empirical evidence is given in the reference below to underscore the significance of the determinants of adaptive capacity in determining vulnerability; these are the determinants upon which the method is constructed. The method was then applied directly to expert judgments of six different adaptations that could reduce vulnerability in the Netherlands to increased flooding along the Rhine River.http://www.aiaccproject.org/resources/
ele_lib_docs/gyoheindicators.doc.pdf
From the Roots Up -
Strengthening
Organisational Capacity
through Guided Self-
Assessment		This field guide providing principle and techniques for self-assessment exercises that aim to strengthen organisational capacity in key areas including: representative decision making; communication systems; collaboration with other groups; negotiation for services; identification and prioritization of problems; implementation of activities; lobbying for local interests; clarity of vision and purpose; systems for raising revenue; mobilizing human capital; and monitoring and evaluation.http://rmportal.net/library/content/tools/
biodiversity-conservationtools/putting-
conservation-incontext-cd/capacity-
building-andorganizational-development
resources/Excerpts-From-the-Roots-Up-
Strengthening-Organizational-Capacity-
through-Guided-Self-Assessment
The Five 'A's ModelA tool to be used in diagnosing possible action and points for effective intervention. An organisation can go through three phases to becoming Climate Smart: Pioneer, Emergent and Maturity This is basic model that led to the PACT framing. The Five A’s Model proposes that three elements: AWARENESS, AGENCY and ASSOCIATION are all necessary to create ACTION but to move action on climate change beyond disparate ‘projects’ requires a fifth ‘A’: ARCHITECTURE.  Awareness and understanding of climate change and what it means for your organisation, service or beneficiary group provides an incentive to take action. However, without a sense of knowing what actual steps to take (known as agency) is itself not enough to lead to action. Without agency, people may resist learning more and may even feel disempowered by the knowledge. Association (working with others to deliver change/action) is a key force in turning accumulated awareness and agency into action. Creating emotionally safe environments for people to work and learn together strengthens the individual’s and organisation’s ability to take meaningful action through promoting a collective response. This architecture provides the enabling environment for embedding climate change into operations and organisational strategyRealising a sustainable world for our children, becoming climate smart – guidance for the children’s sector,
http://www.ncb.org.uk/media/298739/
realising_a_sustainable_world_
for_our_children.pdf
Adaptation Wheel, IVMA diagnostic tool for organisational and sectoral capacity assessment designed to examine an institution’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. Adaptive Capacity Wheel shows the inherent capacity of an institution to respond to change. It is proposed that institutions capacity to address climate risk fall into six dimensions: variety, learning capacity, room for autonomous change, leadership, resources and fair governance.Three case studies in
Zaanstad,Wijdewormer and Delft
were undertaken to study how local
actors perceive the division of
responsibilities between the state
and themselves with respect to
water management.
http://www.ess.wur.nl/UK/Products+
and+Results/The+Dutch+institutional+
framework+and+governance+of+
adaptation+strategies/
Climate Learning LadderThe climate learning ladder offers a way to structure policy analysis, support reflection and identify critical decisions to support climate adaptation at various scales - local regional and national. Building capacity to cope with climate change goes beyond providing information on climate impacts to policy makers. It is a multistep social process in which individuals and organizations need to learn how to: (1) manage different framings of the issues at stake while raising awareness of climate risks and opportunities, (2) understand different motives for, and generate incentives or sanctions to ensure, action, (3) develop feasible options and resources for individual and collective transformation and collaboration and (4) institutionalize new rights, responsibilities and feedback learning processes for climate adaptation in the long term. These four dimensions are presented as a hypothetical ‘ladder’ of conditions that the authors propose are crucial for adaptive climate capacity building. For each step a series of research questions and policy arenas that need to be considered in order to successfully develop climate learning capacities in the long term. ‘Unlearning’, or ‘moving down the climate ladder’, may also occur wherever agents and institutions lose the knowledge and capacities acquired over time to cope with climate risks.This tool is the result of the reflexive learning process that occurred while developing innovative appraisal methods in the Alxa League of Inner Mongolia, China, and in the Guadiana river basin in the European Union. For more information go to:
http://www.tea.ac.cn/upfile/
20101213155918-0.pdf
Attributes of well adapting
organisations		This review of 17 different framings of organisational adaptive capacity was prepared by UKCIP for the UK Adaptation Sub Committee in 2010. It draws out common attributes cited in the 17 framings about what makes an organisation ‘well-adapting’ and reflects on UKCIP’s own experience of supporting organisations in UK to build adaptive capacity. http://www.ukcip.org.uk/



The UKCIP guidance note on identifying adaptation options distinguishes four targets for measures and strategies that contribute either to building adaptive capacity or delivering adaptation actions (UKCIP, 2008):
  1. Accepting the impacts and bearing losses, which reflects a conscious decision that no action is needed to address foreseeable climate hazards, either because the hazards themselves represent a small or acceptable risk with existing measures, or because the exposure unit is not judged worth sustaining and alternatives will need to be considered.
  2. Preventing effects or reducing risks, which involves the introduction of new measures designed to reduce exposure of assets to new or heightened risks. Such an approach pre-supposes that the exposure unit is of sufficient value to warrant some degree of protection.
  3. Offsetting losses by spreading or sharing risks or losses, which implies using insurance or establishing partnerships or cooperatives to reduce financial or social losses and minimise exposure to risks.
  4. Exploiting positive opportunities, which might involve the introduction of new activities or behaviour to take advantage of reduced climate risks or a move to a new location to exploit favourable climate shifts.

These alternative strategies are mapped against different evaluation criteria in Figure 3-2, noting that in practice a mixture of strategies is commonly adopted, the precise combination determined by the specific case in question. The pivotal role of dialogue between researchers and stakeholders becomes apparent when considering the formal analytical methods commonly applied for identifying potential adaptation options. These include (Willows and Connell, 2003): brainstorming, consultation exercises, focus groups, analysis of interconnected decision areas (AIDA), problem mapping tools, checklists, screening, free-form gaming, and policy exercises.

In some cases model-based approaches have also been used to identify robust adaptation options, and these approaches are also applicable to other contexts. Lempert and Groves (2010) used the Robust Decision Making (RDM) quantitative decisionanalytic process in conjunction with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency (IEUA) to determine appropriate adaptation options for the water management agency. RDM is designed for use in a context of uncertainty, as is the case with climate change. It uses simulation models to assess the performance of agency plans over thousands of plausible futures, using statistical “scenario discovery” algorithms to concisely summarize those futures where the plans fail to perform adequately, and use these resulting scenarios to help decisionmakers understand the vulnerabilities of their plans and assess the options for ameliorating these vulnerabilities. For IEUA, the RDM analysis suggests the agency's current plan could perform poorly and lead to high shortage and water provisioning costs under conditions of: (1) large declines in precipitation, (2) larger-than-expected impacts of climate change on the availability of imported supplies, and (3) reductions in percolation of precipitation into the region's groundwater basin. Including adaptivity in the current plan eliminates 72% of the high-cost outcomes. Accelerating efforts in expanding the size of one of the agency's groundwater banking programs and implementing its recycling program, while monitoring the region's supply and demand balance and making additional investments in efficiency and storm-water capture if shortages are projected provides one promising robust adaptive strategy — it eliminates more than 80% of the initially-identified high-cost outcomes.


Figure 3-2: Framework for identifying adaptation options (Source: UKCIP, 2008).

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