These two organisational case studies both show the idealised nature of resilience as a form of adaptation. Over time and faced with new challenges, policy directives or sources of information organisations are in a constant process of reinvention. Those that are not will likely not survive long in the everyday cut and thrust of market and political life. Given this reality there is a danger that rather than organisations being tools for protecting valued functions they strive to maintain their own longevity: resilience being transferred from function to form. Neither organisation studied here fell into this trap; members of Gra.s.shoppers in particular observed that they valued the social bonds made through the group more than the group itself and that these were a resource should future challenges require new coalitions and communities of practice be formed. The close ties of trust in Gra.s.shoppers also provided a key quality control mechanism that was less easy to observe functioning in the shadow system of the Environment Agency. In the latter case new ideas succeeded better with external validation through academic papers, for example. The need for accountability and measured decision-making in public sector bodies is a particular challenge to those who would argue for embracing the shadow system to build adaptive capacity.
Respondents in both groups described their social relations in terms of communities and networks. Communities provide a powerful focus of social ident.i.ty, but without the linking function provided by networks they risked becoming isolated from the broad pool of human learning. Networks, on the other hand, can be too diffuse, failing to provide an adequate basis for organised action, except in circ.u.mstances where the need to do so overrides the transaction costs involved in negotiating different interests.
The empirical observations made in this chapter support arguments from adaptive management for the contribution of relational qualities such as trust, learning and information exchange in processes of building adaptive capacity. They also caution that social networks or communities of practice will always exclude some actors and ideas and should not be seen as a panacea. For organisational management concerned with adapting to climate change four questions are raised by this research: * Can the informal social relationships of the shadow system be embraced inside public sector organisations or are potential conflicts with the need for efficiency, transparency and vertical accountability intolerable?
* To what extent can investments in local formal organisations, like Gra.s.shoppers, foster and maintain independent but linked shadow systems providing a secondary local social resource for climate change adaptation?
* To what extent might contingency planning to manage climate change risk compromise or complement efforts to build adaptive capacity to manage uncertainty?
* What management, training and communication tools exist to facilitate the building and maintaining of constructive social capital and social learning within and between organisations?
Modifying formal inst.i.tutions to support motivated professionals in developing informal social ties and expand their membership of communities of practice to cross epistemic divides is one way of addressing this final challenge. At a larger scale investment in boundary organisations and individuals will help thicken the social resource for adaptation, and better cope not only with the direct impacts of climate change but the more dynamic organisation landscape that may well be an outcome of the economic as well as environmental instability a.s.sociated with climate change. Scope for adapting governance regimes through transitional and transformational change is the focus of the next two chapters.
7.
Adaptation as urban risk discourse and governance.
In Cancun the most common idea is that "it is not my problem, if things go bad, I can flee to another state".
(Ex-member of the Quintana Roo State Congress).
The population mobility that enables and characterises rapid urbanisation has consequences also for discourses of responsibility, and finally the willingness and capacity of officials and those at risk to take action and reduce exposure and susceptibility to climate-change-a.s.sociated hazards in a specific place. Mobile urban populations and the dynamic economies and social systems they are part of present both a context for climate change adaptation and, through the inequalities they generate, a target for transitional and transformational reform.
This chapter uses urban cases because the social and political concentration of urbanisation brings to the surface competing visions and practices of development. But the key argument of this chapter that as discourses of adaptation begin to emerge worldwide they can either challenge or further entrench development inequalities and failures is applicable across all development sectors.
Evidence for the interaction of adaptation with development norms and practice is presented from four rapidly expanding, but contrasting, urban centres in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo: Cancun (population in 2008 approximately 1.3 million), Playa del Carmen (100,000), Tulum (5,000) and Mahahual (1,000) (see Figure 7.1).
Quintana Roo is amongst the most rapidly urbanising places worldwide. Urbanisation is driven by state-sponsored and globally-financed international tourism in an area exposed to hurricanes and temperature extremes. National policy to exploit the environment of Quintana Roo for tourism attracts over 2 million tourists a year alongside large numbers of labour migrants from neighbouring states as well as international capital, and so generates risk to climate-change-a.s.sociated hurricane hazards and more indirect impacts of climate change on the global economy and subsequent tourist numbers. As capital investment in tourism increases so the environmental attractor for tourists has changed from reef diving to beach tourism and now golf course condominiums. At each stage capital has inserted itself ever more forcefully between nature and its consumer. In so doing capital has generated and extracted greater financial returns while Figure 7.1 Quintana Roo and study sites (Source: adapted from Cuentame ... de Mexico, 2009) alienating the consumer from her ecological foundations. The process has shifted economic reliance from a natural to an increasingly artificial "second nature" (Smith, 1984). The result is a bifurcation in development strategies between those that exploit residual "natural" s.p.a.ces and the growing, capital intensive exploitation of second nature with greater environmental and social external costs as well as wealth generating potential. Capital insertion and the imposition of a second nature have occurred at different paces and can be found existing to varying degrees along the Caribbean coast. Cancun is the most intensive, with Playa del Carmen also presenting a mature capitalised urban system. Mahahual and Tulum are small urban centres at the brink of rapid capitalisation. The focus of this study is to explore the character of civil society within each urban form and so to examine the ways in which the urban process has given shape to and been influenced by this aspect of governance with a view to applying this knowledge to a.s.sess capacity to cope with current and adapt to future climate change impacts.
Layered on top of the impacts of capitalisation on the root causes of vulnerability and adaptive capacity is a more superficial but nonetheless important policy realm of hurricane risk management. This is the most tangible expression of hazard liable to be influenced by climate change on the coast. Records for hurricane activity in Quintana Roo begin in 1922 with a category one event (149 kilometres per hour). The first category four event was Charlie in 1951 (212 kilometres per hour), and it has been followed with increasing regularity by four additional category four hurricanes, and Gilbert (1988) and Dean (2007) both making landfall as category five hurricanes. These events reveal underlying vulnerabilities. Hurricane risk management succeeds well in compensating for proximate causes of vulnerability through evacuation of those at risk. But discourse around risk stops here, masking underlying root cause drivers of risk and unsustainable development.
This chapter contrasts with the empirical a.n.a.lysis of organisational adaptation presented in Chapter 4 both in terms of the scale of a.n.a.lysis but also the a.n.a.lytical lens. This shifts from one that stays close to the systems-based a.n.a.lysis of social learning and self-organisation to one that deploys aspects of discourse a.n.a.lysis and regime theory to help emphasise the political and value rich contexts that, alongside capacity for self-organisation, help determine innovation and dissemination of new ideas from the base and how far these might re-shape local governance regimes for adaptation and development in these sites. Different actors are shown to hold contrasting and sometimes conflicting visions of development that in turn lead to preferences for resilience, transition or transformation in society when faced with climate change. Following this introduction a short contextual section provides geographical and methodological background to the study. Each settlement is then a.n.a.lysed using a common framework with a concluding discussion drawing out contrasting relations between adaptation and development in each case.
Context: policy and methods.
In 2007, the federal government launched a National Strategy on Climate Change and is now preparing a Special Programme on Climate Change to implement identified reforms. Thanks to these efforts Mexico has jumped from 14th in 2006 to 4th in 2008 out of 56 countries ranked according to their climate change performance in the Germanwatch, Climate Change Performance Index (Germanwatch, 2008). At the state level, while Quintana Roo"s rapid demographic growth and infrastructural expansion open exciting opportunities to build climate-proofing into development, and at the same time provide a market edge around notions of climate friendly tourism, regional government and private developers have been slow to recognise climate change. In the language of transitions theory (see Chapter 4) this is an example of landscape (national/international) change meeting resistance at the regional (state) level. This begs the question: have any niche (local) level innovations emerged that might provide impetus for change at the regional level given the opportunity for change opened by perturbations at the landscape level?
Local impacts of climate change are felt already through perceived increases in the frequency of hurricanes, creeping sea-level rise, coastal erosion and high temperatures. These hazards are interrelated and compounded by local land use which has led to accelerated mangrove and interior deforestation, pollution and damage to in-sh.o.r.e reefs and the neglect of green and blue s.p.a.ce in urban design. In contrast, state and federal agencies have a good record in containing human loss to hurricanes through timely if reactive strategies of early warning, evacuation and reconstruction of critical services. The most recent event, Hurricane Dean, 2007, caused limited economic impact across the region but made landfall close to Mahahual, which was severely damaged.
To reveal the values, capacities and actions of political actors in each urban centre an action research methodology was employed. In each settlement interviews were conducted with 1215 leaders of social, environmental and business a.s.sociations, and where formal organisation was absent amongst informal leaders. Following interviews, respondents were invited to town-level workshops to discuss results. Workshops provided an opportunity to verify reported views and interpretations, and also a vehicle for social actors to network. This was often the first time social actors had met to discuss climate change. A final workshop brought selected respondents from each settlement together to undertake a partic.i.p.atory comparison of town-level findings and again to provide a networking forum. Interviews and workshop texts were transcribed and data extracted and organised around the themes of development narrative, climate change, social-learning and self-organisation. Results have been fed back to civil society and government actors.
For additional material and a.n.a.lysis see: study a.n.a.lysis.
For each case development pathways and perceived interactions with climate change are described. Innovations from nuance to outright alternative are identified and the capacity of civil society actors to promote such innovations a.s.sessed.
Cancun.
In 1974, Cancun became the first integrally planned centre for ma.s.s tourism in Mexico and it continues to act as a centre for ma.s.s tourism, providing a significant foreign currency source to the federal government and generating significant employment opportunities. The population has grown exponentially from 88,200 in 1970 to 1,135,300 in 2005, creating a huge population potentially at risk from climate change a.s.sociated hazards. Since 1970 Cancun has been directly affected by Hurricanes Gilbert (1988) and Wilma (2005). Vulnerability is aggravated by the exclusion of burgeoning workers" colonies developed on communally owned ejido lands which lie outside of the legal jurisdiction of local governments to provide basic services. Dominant development is controlled by the interests of national and international corporate capital, with many politicians having backgrounds as leading local entrepreneurs. Environmental legislation and urban plans are in place but frequent amendments and the slow pace of bureaucracy allow business interests great flexibility and resilience in the face of legislative, economic and environmental pressures while increasing the time and transactions costs for environmental and social actors seeking to question development proposals. For example, the sensitive Nichupte Lagoon is under constant development pressure; despite an Ecological Zoning Program, hotels and squatter settlements have been allowed. The vision of Cancun as a centre for extractive capital built in a previously unoccupied zone disconnects social actors from a commitment to place and long-term planning. Reflecting on his experience, a Pez Maya Reserve fundraiser noted that "those who partic.i.p.ated the least were local entrepreneurs; more than 70 per cent of funds came from overseas". For hotel workers Cancun society is described as fragmented with traditional values of neighbourliness and a strong family replaced by consumerism and undermined by drugs crime, alcoholism and extremes of inequality. Set against this, migrant workers maintain close links with source communities; for example, by sending children to school outside Cancun.
Respondents were clear that climate change impacts were exacerbated by past, and ongoing, development: deforestation was a.s.sociated with increased temperatures and reduced humidity and the development of dunes for hotels contributed to beach erosion. Hurricanes were also a.s.sociated with climate change and seen as integral to the development history of the city with specific hotel developments being cited as having taken advantage of Hurricanes Gilbert and Wilma to extend land claims into protected mangroves and privatise beach fronts. The comment below from an independent journalist shows the variable nature of disaster management and the long-term psychological and cultural impacts when the state does not fulfil its responsibilities for civil protection and security.
I remember that when Gilberto came Cancun was going to celebrate the Miss Universe contest this focused the attention of the government in Cancun. With Wilma, however, the people of Cancun were left completely on their own. Until the army came to help two days later, the city lived in complete chaos. We stayed 15 days without electricity or water. The most incredible was the contrast between the rapid recovery of the hotel zone and the slow recovery of the rest of the population. Wilma brought a lot of despair and demoralized the population. We have not still recovered from that. People stopped to believe. Still today there is not the happiness that used to be. All this happened because we were left alone.
More positively, after Hurricane Wilma a Climate Change a.s.sociation of Quintana Roo based in Cancun was founded. This small organisation has worked to promote recycling and lobbies against deforestation within existing development narratives. Elsewhere, actors seek to promote climate change in primary school syllabi. Business a.s.sociations see climate change in economic terms with hotel a.s.sociations needing to respond to tour operators threatening to lower tariffs or business volumes due to the poor state of the beaches. For the engineering and architecture community, climate change presents opportunities with recent projects including semi-permeable parking surfaces but with limited support from government. Overall civil society actors see their scope for action as limited compared to government which has power to revise urban planning guidelines, or simply enforce those that already exist, and this understanding of the distribution of power acts to suppress civil action and limit outright critique or confrontation of the dominant capital intensive model of development. This is despite civil society actors recognising that an emerging development paradigm that takes climate change into account can be an opportunity to enhance social development, with this being a particular concern in Cancun with its high inequality.
Civil leadership faces powerful opposition, as an environmental lawyer explained: "It is dangerous to litigate against some powerful groups. We have to be very cautious". For local actors the everyday experience of living with crime, including organised protection rackets, governs people"s ability to voice complaints or instigate change. Civil society groups cited this and the culture of Cancun society, which is described as apathetic (caused by a crisis of credibility in the authorities), lacking in ident.i.ty (with a diverse migrant population) and community spirit (with individuals working hard with little time for social work or volunteerism), as the main barriers to organising critical alternatives. Ma.s.s media is politicised and commercial. Individual civil society groups, lawyers or engineering companies might be competent and independent but they work alone, and often in compet.i.tion, preventing the formation of a coherent social body and vision. One respondent described this as having a lack of inst.i.tutional infrastructure to promote learning and new practices for adaptation and mitigation, arguing that even if people were willing, without this infrastructure changing behaviour would be slow if not impossible.
While the inst.i.tutional framework for strategic innovation and adaptation was lacking in Cancun informational resources were in place. Federal state agencies (the Ecological Gazette of SEMARNAT was twice mentioned) provided scientific data available for scrutiny and that had been used by civil actors in local litigation or lobbying. The Supreme Court judgement that all doc.u.ments and studies related to a development should be in the public domain had also been used by local groups to challenge developments. The Universidad del Caribe, Cancun, is a local source of promotion for sustainable tourism region-wide. Collaboration with local government has been achieved by Amigos de Sian" Kaan in the preparation of a good practice guide for hotels that covers planning and use. In this way technical and management reform have been achieved by civil society groups to support vulnerability reduction, but social, economic, political and cultural systems remained outside discourse and unchallenged.
Playa del Carmen.
Playa del Carmen has a successful and growing economy based on international tourism and in 1994 became the capital of the newly created Munic.i.p.ality of Solidaridad. Since then, Playa has been amongst the fastest growing urban centres of Latin America (above 20 per cent annually) and at times the fastest in the world (Campos Camara, 2007). In 2005 its population exceeded 100,000 inhabitants. Playa has experienced direct hits from hurricanes. The worst challenge came in 2005, with Emily and Wilma a few months later. However, there were no fatalities and the town recovered very rapidly. In fact, the local tourist economy benefited from the relocation of tourists from Cancun, which had been hit even harder by Wilma.
In Playa, the dominant development narrative emphasised personal economic advancement and reflected the control over the local economy held by corporate private sector. Respondents reported on a disjuncture between people and place. Residents felt they were here to "make money", not to settle. The result was a lack of popular commitment to local development and for holding private sector and government actors to account, as one social development activist reported: "there is a lack of civic pride and ident.i.ty with place people do not care about the city or even their house and street". Respondents described Playa as embodying an extreme version of the American Dream, celebrating individualism and materialism, and short-term gain over long-term development.
Some described climate change as a symptom of a larger problem of consciousness and the alienating effect of rapid urbanisation; as one respondent put it, "We increasingly behave like machines we need to go back to our community and our roots". More broadly climate change could be a vehicle to hold the government to account if citizens became more engaged in governance. Adaptation (and mitigation) was seen as a leverage point for existing social and environmental agendas with progress reported in specific sectors; for example, the Sustainable Coastal Tourism Plan, believed to be the first in Mexico, includes guidance on beach and mangrove management. Huge scope for mitigation in the hotel sector was recognised with minimal current use of alternative energy, water recycling and waste management. The Small Hotels a.s.sociation of Playa del Carmen and the Maya Riviera explained that the high proportion of family run hotels in Playa makes the sector responsive to calls for environmentally sustainable practices. Strategy for future adaptation included reinitiating local food production as a local livelihood resource as well as a means of making some independence from global markets. External knowledge and expertise was accessed by NGOs through supporter networks and commercial links and had been instrumental in successful legal challenges to developments made on environmental grounds including X-Cacel, X-Cacelito and the Ultramar Doc. These were important symbolic successes, demonstrating that enforcing environmental controls need not jeopardise local economic growth.
Civil society groups tended to operate as top-down advocates or satellites to the governmentcorporate-business policy-making core. One social development leader observed that "organisations are closed they inform only staff and families, there is little public communication about plans or opportunities". This reflected the lack of trust and individualised nature of Playa"s society, one where, as one respondent put it, there was "no culture for donations, public partic.i.p.ation or volunteerism". Perhaps because of a lack of local embeddedness, the personalised character of civil society organisation and its orientation towards government, there were few examples of collaboration across sectors. This is a particular challenge for building capacity for progressive adaptation.
Individual acts had successfully challenged dominant cultural and social norms; for example, through the provision of civic amenities including the Ceiba Park to show local residents that they too, and not only tourists or the locally wealthy, were worthy of a healthy local environment. Speaking up in public consultations was claimed to have symbolic as well as instrumental significance through demonstrating the exercising of a local voice. The facilitating of neighbourhood talking groups aimed to strengthen families. Still many residents did not see themselves as citizens of Playa but of their home towns and states, making the building of any gra.s.sroots-led call for change very challenging. Greater capacity for adaptation, albeit of a resilient kind, was observed with civil society groups operating close to the private sector: innovation included dive companies that opened inland cave-diving sites in response to deteriorating coastal environments. The importance of local and global ecosystem services to the local tourist economy also provided a narrative for current development planning and regulation and one that could be adapted to include climate-proofing.
Tulum.
Tulum was until the 1970s a Mayan ejido of subsistence farmers. The ejido"s settlement was established about 2km inland, and thus protected from hurricanes by a generous stretch of mangroves and forest. Driven by in-migration, Tulum"s population grew exponentially following the construction of a highway and in the 1980s, as low density hotels proliferated along its outlying beach front. By 2004 there were 53 hotels in Tulum offering 1,235 rooms and a permanent population of around 1,000. Hotel designs range from concrete three-storey buildings to very basic thatched cabins, and often include renewable energy and other eco-friendly features. Although some of the hotels are owned by external actors (Mexican and foreign entrepreneurs), the majority are owned and managed by local or partly local entrepreneurs. As in Playa, ejidatarios benefited from selling land and some of them are now wealthy even if still preserving some of their traditional ways of life. In April 2008 the state government granted the independence of Tulum as a new munic.i.p.ality.
Today, Tulum is at a crossroads with two competing development narratives. The dominant narrative portrays Tulum as an opportunity for speculative development. This is symbolised by the "Downtown Tulum" development, a project forged and implemented by Yucatecan entrepreneurs in concomitance with the governor of the state. The works for the first phase started in January 2008 and contemplate the urbanisation of 77 hectares located between the town and the beach. The second phase comprises 450 hectares including a mega golf course that would extend up to the beach and a grid of water channels resembling an inland marina.
An alternative narrative is oriented more towards local Mayan values and ecological and community sustainability. This vision was championed by a small group of well-educated local businesses leaders and civil society groups, but optimism for the future of Tulum as a sustainable tourism centre is limited. Respondents presented striking visions for an alternative development, but felt in reality small gains that can build resiliency into development are all that is likely to be achieved in resisting the corporate transformation of Tulum.
We already have failed models such as Acapulco and Cancun and we do not want to fall into the same in Tulum. It is almost impossible for local people to affect the model or direction of development. However, there are local pressures to, for instance, make wider sidewalks or guarantee the connection of drainage to a waste water treatment. We want that they build drainage before paving any street. (Former president, Tulum Hotel a.s.sociation) Alternative economic vision is provided by community (ejido) owned development at the Dos Ojos cave system and at a bio-region project at Jacinto Pat Ejido. Most ejido lands and individual owners have sold to speculative capital and subsequently left Tulum but these examples show an economic rationale for development led by and for the benefit of local people with a concern for environmental integrity. Some medium-scale migrant entrepreneurs support this vision, with the Chan Chay Ecological Shop providing green cleaning products for the hotel sector but also organsing workshops, and a Green Expo in Tulum to promote this site as a "green spot on the Maya Riviera".
Local consequences of climate change are recognised, most significantly a.s.sociated with increased hurricane activity and higher temperatures, both exacerbated locally by deforestation of mangroves and coastal forest and intensive urbanisation.
Climate change is impacting through housing development. The areas that were for conservation are now being urbanized and this is generating disequilibrium. There have been protests against the Aldea Zama project and now we have an environmental department in the Munic.i.p.al Council, but this type of progress is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g us up. (Manager, Zero Workshop Foundation) Tourist occupation as well as local quality of life is reported to be affected directly, with concerns on a shift from high- to low-end tourists at periods of hurricane activity, and indirectly; for example, through the loss of a section of coast road with every pa.s.sing hurricane. For other civil actors climate change presented an opportunity to press dominant development processes and lobby for change. For the Centro Ecologico Ak.u.mal "climate change can slow down development due to the recurrence of hurricanes. This would give us a chance to shift the dynamics". Similarly, the Chan Chay Ecological Shop saw climate change and its media coverage as contributing to ongoing efforts to motivate individuals and businesses to become more ecologically responsible. For most civil society actors capacity to respond was limited to raising awareness through public workshops and school visits. Coastal reef management has generated some local research and conservation work receives international coverage but is not framed by climate change adaptation.
Social leaders identified considerable barriers to organising for adaptation and change. There was no culture of active resistance in Tulum, but rather one of silence and compliance; at the same time new migrants were less concerned about Tulum"s environment than economic opportunities and so supported the dominant vision of development. For the local and migrant populations compliance was underwritten by a lack of educational opportunities, with TV being the primary source of information and opinion forming. Several respondents saw the promotion of an alternative development not as a challenge of providing information but of working with partners to raise critical consciousness a deep shift in local mindsets that are accustomed to mediating development through adaptive ingenuity, to use Freire"s terminology; an ambitious aim and one made more so by the weaknesses of the civil sector in Tulum, which was acknowledged to be small with isolated organisations easily coopted by dominant business interests. Middle cla.s.ses and young professionals that might be at the forefront of organising local social movements were overworked and had little time for public work. The crisis in leadership was such that some respondents looked hopefully to international NGOs.
While undermining local visions for development, the urbanisation process itself also offered opportunities for organising alternatives. Development increased the external visibility of Tulum, and provided opportunities for accessing information; for example, through technical support from the federal agency SEDESOL and the French Emba.s.sy, which offered knowledge exchanges with French Munic.i.p.alities. Drafting of the Urban Development Plan included citizen consultation but with limited impact, with the most positive consequence of this experiment in partic.i.p.atory governance being its slowing down development providing time for alternative discourses to a.s.sert themselves outside of the formal planning process. The new munic.i.p.al authority expressed concern about the loss of Tulum"s existing cultural and ecological character in the tidal wave of approaching development, but looked to the federal government for leadership and capacity.
Mahahual.
Mahahual is a pioneer settlement with a population of about 500, largely in-migrants from Mexico and internationally. From 2008 Mahahual was conferred the status of Alcaldia and administered through a local council with responsibility for the tourism centre with its beach properties, modern residential properties, cruise ship terminal and several small satellite residential and farming communities, including an informal settlement located two kilometres away from the main centre. As the economic base shifted from fishing to tourism rapid in-migration and land speculation have changed the physical and social structure of the town. Few original families remain and these are a small minority compared to the immigrant population. The local economy has experienced a boom since the construction of the cruise ship terminal, with land speculation driving a healthy virtual economy. Hurricane Dean made a direct hit on Mahuhual in August 2007, with the subsequent closure of the cruise ship terminal stalling the local economy.
As a pioneer settlement there was a feeling of excitement and opportunity directed by a desire to build Mahahual without being dominated by cruise tourism. It was an "open frontier" where local residents had a central stake in shaping the future. Here, the need to build community was a common aspiration with some working towards this, but mistrust in social organisation and leadership was pervasive, in business, social and local government organisation alike. Environmental concerns were marginal; for residents development meant the improvement of critical physical and social infrastructure and promotion of the local economy. However, one leader of a social development group suggested that following Hurricane Dean a slow process of cultural change may have begun: "after Dean one is starting to feel more solidarity. It is happening as in Cozumel, people there are building solidarity as a result in part of facing many hurricanes".
The common construction of climate change in terms of hurricane risk played down long-term thinking. Accepting hurricane risk as a development externality also contributed to individual businesses and the regional and federal state being cast as the actors with primary responsibility for responding to climate change. The local council, which should be a driving force for adaptation, had not yet taken this role. Practical action was limited to a.s.sociated environmental agendas; for example, the Tourism Entrepreneurs a.s.sociation of Costa Maya campaigned to clean the village with the partic.i.p.ation of the authorities, and lobbied to prevent trucks coming into the village and for investment in waste recycling. Information networks were extensive stretching to other parts of the state, Mexico and overseas, and led, for example, to calls for a local civil protection body in local government.
Before Hurricane Dean, low levels of trust with any form of social organisation was aggravated by Mahajual"s diverse and atomised society, with many immigrants and a small population base that constrained the leap from individual to collective action. The leader of a fishing cooperative reflected on the impact of low trust on the formation of his group: "We had to make three meetings before we could elect a president. People tend to attack those who stand out from the rest. They think one is looking for his own benefit." The combination of economic and governance constraints was exemplified well by the residents of Km55, a satellite settlement with formal and informal land holdings where one leader reported that "only 36 of 400 plots are occupied, the rest are held speculatively; this makes it hard to organise". Another noted that "uncertainty about land t.i.tling is delaying; for example, people will not put electricity in their lots until this is solved".
After Hurricane Dean, reconstruction opened a window for building common ident.i.ty (as temporary labour migrants and uncommitted investors left) and potential for collective action. A businessman reported that: Before Dean I tried many times to create an a.s.sociation, but without Dean and all this easy money n.o.body paid much attention. All the ideas that I was proposing turned out to be right after Dean. Now people are starting to build common culture because the ones who have stayed do not see this place only in terms of money.
Some individuals also took advantage of governance failures post-Dean with examples of mangroves being illegally cleared, but for those seeing potential in collective action reconstruction served as a common context for organising. A sense that local civil society actors had a stake in shaping the future of Mahahual was reinforced by a search for alternative tourist markets following the temporary closure of the cruise terminal. This was driven by individual companies with minimal state support. Still many respondents felt that Mahahual"s recent Alcaldia status would also open new opportunities for collaboration with local government and the Alcadia was also concerned to project itself as seeking to build partnerships with local civil society, providing real scope for mainstreaming climate change.
Conclusion.
The preceding a.n.a.lysis presented dominant and alternative discourses on development, climate change and scope for adaptation in each study site from the viewpoint of local civil society actors. Here a comparative a.n.a.lysis is presented to draw out differences in the ways in which adaptation was used to promote resilience, transition or transformation within the particular development contexts of each site. Table 7.1 summarises this a.n.a.lysis. As a caveat, it is important to note the methodological challenges in capturing and then representing the diversity of views on development and climate change in a reductive but Table 7.1 Adaptation as an opportunity and narrative for development discourse and action Cancun Playa Tulum Mahahual Dominant development vision Intensive, large scale, corporate extractive capitalism Corporate and local extractive capitalism Transform environment into commodity for speculative investors Small scale pioneer capitalism Perceived climate change risk Translated into a challenge for tourism marketing, insurance and engineering design; not a concern for local social and environmental integrity Risk of marginal concern in the planning horizon of businesses and government Risk denied or a.s.sumed to be planned out in the future so of little consequence for future investments Climate change threatens economic base through damage to cruise tourism Adaptation opens scope for: Resilience as discourse Improve coastal engineering and tourist building design Maintain beach and coastal water quality An opportunity for greening business and promoting mitigation Generate new markets independent of cruise tourism Resilience as action Beach replenishment, artificial reef design, hotel retrofit Beach replenishment, dive companies market interior sites Marketing and informing businesses Individual acts of marketing Lead actors Munic.i.p.ality, engineering consultants Munic.i.p.ality, SMEs SMEs SMEs Transition as discourse a.s.sert rights to police dominant vision by exercising ent.i.tlements for environmental sustainability a.s.sert rights to challenge dominant vision by exercising ent.i.tlements for development control Economic growth is welcome if controlled a.s.sertion of ident.i.ty through new council status and following Dean to leverage funds for local development Transition as action Engage in development consultation and take legal action Legal challenges prevent developments Engage in citizens consultation for Urban Development Plan Collective acts of reconstruction after Hurricane Dean Lead actors Environmental NGOs and lawyers Local environmental NGOs and Cancun based lawyers Some local civil society organisations Local council, SMEs Cancun Playa Tulum Mahahual Adaptation opens scope for: Transformation as discourse Call for extension of basic needs and risk management to migrant worker colonies; puts distributional equity at the heart of alternative vision Building self-worth and critical consciousness amongst migrant workers as a first step for reclaiming a voice in development Raise critical consciousness of environmental and cultural costs of extractive development None Transformation as action None Symbolic acts, e.g. La Ceiba Park reclaims quality green s.p.a.ce for locals Popular education None Lead actors Independent journalists and social development NGOs Social and cultural development NGOs Cultural NGOs None meaningful way are not insubstantial. Table 7.1 seeks only to represent the most influential narratives and a.s.sociated actions and key actors linked to resilience, transitional and transformative adaptations. Resilience is indicated by efforts to maintain business-as-usual development paths; transition exercises existing legal and governance rights to confront unsustainable development, and transformation uses adaptation to promote fundamentally alternative forms of development from those described for each site as dominant.
Across the sites some commonalities emerge. Local government and business interests are prominent in responding to climate change through building resilience, which is also the predominant form that adaptation takes in each case. In contrast civil society groups and environmental lawyers are most prominent in transitional acts, using adaptation to push for greater transparency, partic.i.p.ation and accountability within the existing governance system. Cultural actors, including NGOs and journalists, emerge as leading transformation, which exists largely at the level of discourse, with some acts of popular education and symbolic initiatives aimed at promoting popular critical consciousness. Given the strong voice of government and business in shaping the limits of adaptation it is perhaps not surprising that ecological modernisation is the dominant overarching worldview within which adaptation is being constructed as resilience (from coastal engineering in Cancun and Playa to the greening of business in Tulum), and transition (the use of legislation to regulate development in Cancun and Playa).
For individual workers coping with risks, including those a.s.sociated with climate change but driven more by a search for economic opportunity, is played out within the use of migration as a livelihood strategy. Emotional commitment to locales in Quintana Roo is spread thin and legitimised through cultural norms that accept local residence as temporary and extractive. In contrast migrant workers maintain close links with places of origin, even sending children "home" to be educated. This offers an opportunity for individual and familial resilience with low social transactions costs without the need to engage in social or political collective action in the place of residence.
Given the general acceptance that climate change is already impacting negatively through beach erosion, high temperatures and hurricane activity the level of proactive planning is minimal. This may be a function of the linking of climate change with environmental management and subsequent policy marginalisation, but possibly also points to a denial of risk, especially by those most vulnerable. The common tendency amongst the poor and vulnerable to prioritise economic opportunity over risk reduction is heightened through a majority migrant population that has little a.s.sociation with place or community. Corporate interests in Cancun and Playa have access to engineering solutions and international insurance, and beyond this possibly view their investment in Quintana Roo as temporary. For smaller businesses and the resident population scope to adapt is more limited, and as was most keenly demonstrated in Tulum, for many migrants rapid transformation of the environment into a form that can be exploited by capital has attracted them to the coast. Climate change is pushed to the margins of people"s imagination as well as their actions. The one major exception is Mahahual where Hurricane Dean caused the loss of the town"s economic base. While Mahahual"s population is almost entirely composed of recent migrants, the effect of Dean as well as the recent awarding of town council status has begun to build a social ident.i.ty.
The aim of this chapter has been to reveal the messiness of a.n.a.lysing adaptation where political values and actions are both contested and tightly circ.u.mscribed by a rigid political and economic framework. In the language of transitions theory the cases all display strong tendencies for stability with limited scope for local innovations to affect change in regimes through adaptation, partly a result of the limited range of innovations observed (examples included the La Ceiba Park in Playa, which provided the dual function of meeting a service need for urban green s.p.a.ce but also potentially inspiring critical consciousness, and material alternatives such as ejido controlled development and the Chan Chay Ecological Shop in Tulum). This is compounded by a lack of a supporting inst.i.tutional architecture (including values and a legaladministrative framework) to aid the dissemination of innovations; and a strong dominant existing political-economic and administrative regime. Even where disaster events have been experienced, revealing failures in the dominant regimes and development pathways, pre-disaster political, economic and cultural structures have changed little. Resilience remains the dominant mode of adaptation across this region. It remains to be seen how far this will be true as increasing population, physical and financial a.s.sets are exposed to climate change a.s.sociated hazards in the future.
8.
Adaptation as national political response to disaster.
... moments when underlying causes can come together in a brief window, a window ideally suited for mobilizing broader violence. But such events can also have extremely positive outcomes if the tensions [...] are recognized and handled well.
(USAID, 2002).
This description of post-disaster political s.p.a.ce highlights the possibility that political outcomes are not predetermined by history but open to influence, in this case by the interests of an international political and economic actor.
Context: policy and methods.
The reflexivity of socio-ecological systems allows us to envision climate change impacts as unfolding within ongoing socio-political trajectories. Disaster events, and especially reconstruction periods, open s.p.a.ce for change in dominant technical, policy and political regimes (Pelling and Dill, 2010). Very often such changes are best cla.s.sified as adding resilience to pre-disaster socio-technological systems. New technology to improve the resistance of infrastructure, or policy reform such as the enforcement of building regulations, allow political and economic business as usual. Sometimes, however, unacceptable failures in the dominant regime to meet its responsibilities for risk reduction and response can act as a catalyst for political level change and open scope for transformational adaptation that goes beyond disaster risk management to influence social life and the distribution of political power in society. Chapter 7 identifies the most likely pre-conditions for such changes, which include economic inequality, a pre-existing and organised alternative to dominant politics and a sufficiently high impact event (Albala-Bertrand, 1993; Drury and Olson, 1998; Pelling and Dill, 2006).
It is not only natural disasters that provide sufficient shocks to destabilise dominant political regimes, but these are perhaps the most directly related to the influence of climate change. In the future, climate change will likely be a factor of growing significance in many other kinds of shock, especially those compound events felt locally from the conjuncture of multiple factors. The most recent example of this was the 2008 global food crisis. A combination of changes in local planting regimes (a shift from wheat and maize for consumption to bio-fuels), increasing demand (for example, from China"s rapidly expanding middle cla.s.s), exceptional drought and the failure of key regional harvests (for example, the Australian rice harvest), and instability in the global financial systems (commodity speculation at a time of high carbon fuel price) destabilised water-food systems resulting in increased hunger and malnutrition for the poorest with crises in 37 countries. At places this has fed back into the political system through violent protests in such diverse countries as Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal and Yemen (FAO, 2008). In this context, natural disaster events provide early insight into the ways in which specific political systems respond to shocks and what we might reasonably expect if failure to adapt to reduce risk leads to more frequent and severe events (Schipper and Pelling, 2006).