Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Climate Change, Adaptation, and Vulnerability

Climate Change, Adaptation, and Vulnerability This article reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within an evolutionary theory of social change premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and corporate actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by using alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources, and creating or exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice, and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability results from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood, and well-being. This framework combines organizational sociologists’ insights into structure–environment interaction; constructionists’ attention to agency, language, culture, and values; and political ecologists’ concerns with power, inequality, and processes of marginalization. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Organization & Environment SAGE

Climate Change, Adaptation, and Vulnerability

McLaughlin, Paul
Organization & Environment , Volume 24 (3): 23 – Sep 1, 2011
Download PDF
23 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/climate-change-adaptation-and-vulnerability-RjNJMyHeQm

References (154)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© SAGE Publications 2011
ISSN
1086-0266
eISSN
1552-7417
DOI
10.1177/1086026611419862
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within an evolutionary theory of social change premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and corporate actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by using alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources, and creating or exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice, and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability results from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood, and well-being. This framework combines organizational sociologists’ insights into structure–environment interaction; constructionists’ attention to agency, language, culture, and values; and political ecologists’ concerns with power, inequality, and processes of marginalization.

Journal

Organization & Environment – SAGE

Published: Sep 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.