Climate Change, Adaptation and Vulnerability:
Reconceptualizing Societal-Environment Interaction within a
Socially Constructed Adaptive Landscape
Paul McLaughlin
Department of Sociology
121 D Sturges Hall
SUNY Geneseo
Geneseo, NY 14454
mclaughp@geneseo.edu
Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation: Theory and Cases
ICARUS: Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences
SDEP Initiative of the Department of Geography
School of Earth Society and Environment and Beckman Institute
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
February 11-13, 2010
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Abstract
This paper reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within a
broader 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 employing alternative collective action frames,
mobilizing resources and 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 is
treated as resulting 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, constructivists’ attention to agency, language, culture and values as well as political
ecologists concerns with power, inequality and processes of marginalization.
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Introduction
Recent research on climate change reinforces the growing scientific consensus that people, communities and
ecosystems face significant risks in the coming century. Moreover, as it becomes clear that “even the most
stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further climate change in the next few decades” (Parry et al. 2007:71),
questions of adaptation and vulnerability are increasingly coming to the forefront of investigation (Adger et al.
2009; Birkmann 2006). Although the emerging literature on these topics is generally of high quality and
provides important insights, it also exhibits a lack of theoretical integration. For instance, adaptation is treated
as a social process which occurs in response to climate change rather than as a theoretical concept relevant to
our understanding of the causes of climate change itself. Adaptation is further differentiated from mitigation,
the former conceptualized as occurring only after and to the extent to which efforts to bring about the latter fail
(Orlove 2005). Moreover, different social mechanisms of adaptation are not adequately distinguished and the
relationships between adaptation and vulnerability are not clearly articulated.
I address these concerns by reconceptualizing adaptation and vulnerability within a broader evolutionary
theory of social change, one capable of addressing the interrelated dynamics of social structure, human agency
and the environment while avoiding the pitfalls associated with essentialist and nominalist approaches to
theorizing societal-environment interaction (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). Specifically, I explore the concept of
a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain.
Individual and collective actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by employing
alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources and 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 is treated as resulting from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining
individual and collective health, livelihood and well being.
I begin by discussing how the concept of an adaptive landscape, derived from biology, can be generalized to
the case of social evolution and used to create an integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction. I
then explore the dynamics of a socially constructed adapted landscape, including how individual and corporate
actors employ various mechanisms to adapt to such landscapes, how they attempt to actively reshape them by
legitimating (delegitimating) alternative social structures and how they partition landscapes through the
construction (deconstruction) of boundaries demarcating social forms. I discuss how this framework can be
used to conceptualize adaptation and vulnerability to climate change and conclude by summarizing the
advantages of this perspective and some of its implications for further research.
Toward an Evolutionary Perspective on Societal-Environment Interaction
Prerequisites. An integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction must be capable of addressing
the interrelated dynamics of social structure, human agency and the environment (McLaughlin 2001). It must
explain changes in the number, size, kinds and characteristics of the social structures at various levels of
analysis--e.g., habits, roles, routines, organizations. And it must conceptualize these changes both as a response
to variations in the biophysical, social, economic, political and discursive environments and as a cause of them.
Such a perspective must also take into account human agency–i.e., the capacity of individual and corporate
actors, and the diverse cultural meanings and values they espouse, to play an independent causal role in history
--by explaining how actors alter their own structural and environmental contexts. Finally, any satisfactory
perspective on societal-environment interaction must be fully relational. It must treat individual and corporate
actors as inextricably embedded in their biophysical and social environments.
The absence of such an integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction can be traced to the
persistence of essentialism within the human ecology and political economy traditions and nominalism within
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the constructivist tradition (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). The former metatheoretical strategy has been
associated with a number of recurrent problems, including an inability to theorize the diversity of social systems
in both time and space, a discounting of the role of human agency and culture, a failure to incorporate the
biophysical environment as an independent causal force, ethnocentrism and a bias toward technological
solutions. The latter strategy is responsible for constructivist’s inability to adequately theorize the dynamics of
social structure and their tendency to subsume nature into history
McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) argue that an evolutionary perspective on social change, grounded in a critical
realist epistemology, provides the best prospect for overcoming these impasses. In recent decades, evolutionary
theories have emerged within several disciplines, including anthropology (Durham 1992), economics (Nelson
and Winter 1982; Norgaard 1994), human ecology (Dietz, Burns and Buttel 1990; Richerson and Boyd 2005),
political science (Ostrom 2000) and organizational sociology (Hannan and Freeman 1989). In contrast to older,
linear developmental theories, these more recent evolutionary perspectives are premised on the rejection of
essentialism and assume that history is inherently multilinear and relational (McLaughlin 2001). Moreover,
paralleling Darwinian biology, they rely on the variation, selection and retention of cultural information or rules
as the central mechanism underlying social change. To date, such evolutionary perspectives have not been
brought fully to bear on the questions of adaptation or vulnerability to climate change.
In developing an evolutionary perspective on adaptation and vulnerability, I follow the above theorists by
assuming that the transmission of social information or rules provides an analogue to biological inheritance
(Dietz and Burns 1992). Social rules, in short, are replicators or the cultural equivalent of genes. Moreover,
paralleling the distinction between genotype and phenotype in biology, I differentiate between replicators and
interactors (Hull 1988). That is, I argue that rules only become socially relevant when they are interpreted or
translated into action by individuals or groups in the form of habits, roles, routines, organizations and other
patterned forms of interaction. Multiple instances of these structures constitute a population. It is the differential
selection of rules within and between these populations that drives social evolution.
Adaptive Landscapes. A useful metaphor for visualizing social evolution is the concept of an adaptive
landscape. As originally put forward in a biological context by Sewall Wright (1932), an adaptive landscape
refers to a three-dimensional topography where the X and Y axes represent combinations of allele frequencies at
different loci while the Z axis represents the fitness of each combination. G.G. Simpson (1944) later extended
this model by letting the X and Y axes represent phenotypic traits. This reformulation operationalizes the
landscape in terms of the structural and behavioral characteristics that enhance an organism’s ability to survive
and reproduce in a given environment. In either conceptualization, the peaks of the landscape represent regions
of high fitness, the valleys low fitness. The contours of the landscape, including the number, distribution and
height of various peaks and valleys are dynamic and shaped by the relevant dimensions of the underlying
environment (McGhee 2007; Schluter 2003). Members of a population located in favorable niches higher on the
adaptive surface will tend to increase their prevalence in future generations. Thus, natural selection within this
framework can be characterized as a process of local hill climbing.
The concept of an adaptive landscape can be readily generalized to the case of social evolution. The
structural, behavioral and cultural characteristics of different social structures--e.g., habits, roles, routines or
organizations--define the X and Y axes of the landscape, while fitness again is represented by the vertical
dimension. Fitness in this case is defined in terms of a social unit’s ability to persist--i.e., reproduction in the
traditional sociological sense (Burns and Dietz 1992)--and/or be propagated relative to other units with different
characteristics (Hannan and Freeman 1989).1 Over time, the shape of the landscape shifts in response to changes
in various dimensions of the underlying biophysical, social, economic, political and discursive environments.
The resulting patterns of shifting hills and valleys influence the returns that accrue to any particular adaptive
strategy. Individual social units adapt to changes in the landscape through homeostatic, developmental and
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rational choice mechanisms. Populations of social units adapt to the landscape through differential survival
reflected in changes in the founding and disbanding rates of various social forms.
Theorizing the dynamics of adaptive landscapes requires that three analytically distinct but interrelated
questions be addressed: (1) First, how do individual and corporate actors adapt to changes in their adaptive
landscapes? (2) How and under what circumstances can individual and corporate actors modify the shape of
their adaptive landscapes? and (3) How do individual and corporate actors create and defend the network
boundaries which serve to partition their adaptive landscapes? While each of these questions can be posed at
multiple levels of analysis, I will focus on the organizational level in the remaining discussion.
Adapting to Adaptive Landscapes. Before discussing how organizations adapt and evolve within a
contested evolutionary terrain I must first clarify the multiple meanings of the term adaptation. As Toulmin
(1981:177) notes, the term adaptation does not denote a single concept, but rather a "family of related
concepts." Toulmin identifies four mechanisms or modes of adaptation employed within the social sciences-homeostatic, developmental, calculative or rational choice and populational. While each of these mechanisms
improves performance by bringing about a better match or fit between some social entity and its environment
the causal processes utilized to achieve this fit are distinct in each case.
Organizations adapt homeostatically when they employ the flexibility built into existing organizational
routines to adjust to changes in their environment. Developmental adaptation involves adjustment through
organizational growth and the elaboration or addition of routines--e.g., through household diversification
strategies (Ellis 1998). Organizations also adapt through calculative or rational choice mechanisms when they
use conscious forethought and planning--e.g., through managerial decision making. Finally, populations of
organizations adapt through differential survival (Hannan and Freeman 1989). As Toulmin (1981) notes, social
scientists historically have treated these various mechanisms as competing rather than complementary forms of
explanation. Indeed, the history of organizational sociology reveals a series of paradigms which alternate in
their reliance upon these mechanisms (Scott 2003). The same difficulties can be found in the current literature
on climate change (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008).
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can clarify and integrate these various mechanisms
of adaptation. For example, in the short-term individual organizations attempt to adapt to their landscapes
through homeostatic, developmental and rational choice mechanisms. Organizational sociology offers a variety
of open-systems theories--resource dependency theory, institutional theory, various rational choice theories
(Scott 2003)--that can be employed to describe the movements of individual organizations across adaptive
landscapes. However, such analyses must be combined with longer-term populational accounts of
organizational change. Given the high turnover rates experienced by most organizational populations, analyses
that focus solely on the adaptation of individual organizations will fail to fully account for the spatial and
temporal diversity of organizations. The field of organizational ecology focuses almost exclusively on such
populational dynamics by building statistical models of rates of organizational founding, disbanding, merger
and change (Hannan and Freeman 1989). The advantage of the concept of a socially constructed adaptive
landscape is that it provides a framework which encompasses all of the above mechanisms.
Modifying Adaptive Landscapes. Individual organizations and populations of organizations, however, do
not just passively adapt to their landscapes. Adaptive landscapes are contested terrains. Thus, organizations
simultaneously adapt to and actively attempt to reshape their landscapes. Modifying adaptive landscapes
requires the application of human agency. Unfortunately most current evolutionary theories neglect this issue.
For instance, McLaughlin (2001) discusses how organizational ecologists’ reliance on the inertia metaphor to
justify their use of evolutionary models has led them to discount agency. The result is a mechanistic and overly
structuralist image of social change, one in which adaptive landscapes are taken as given and social units are
passively selected by environments that are treated as exogenous. Helmreich (1999), likewise, criticizes Lansing
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(1995) for failing to adequately integrate agency into his evolutionary simulations of Balinese water temple
networks. I believe that the full incorporation of agency, culture and values can extend the realism and
explanatory power of such evolutionary perspectives (Scoones 1999). As Dietz and Burns (1992) argue,
evolutionary perspectives actually facilitate the integration of agency into social theory.
Even in biology, it is increasingly recognized that organisms can modify the distribution of local resources
which can, in turn, significantly alter ecological and evolutionary patterns (Odling-Smee et al. 2003). Such
processes of niche construction are even more important in the case of social evolution. That is, if individual
and corporate actors are continually formulating alternative courses of action and bringing those imaginative
projections to bear on current pragmatic situations, then the shape and dynamics of adaptive landscapes cannot
be treated as exogenous (McLaughlin 2001). Rather, as Bourdieu (1985) suggests with his concept of a social
topology--i.e., a socially constructed multi-dimensional space defined by accumulations of various forms of
social and material capital--such landscapes must themselves be seen as subject to continual negotiation and
contestation. Peluso and Watts (2001:25) employ a related image in their account of political ecology, arguing
that “The environment is an arena of contested entitlements, a theater in which conflicts or claims over
property, assets, labor, and the politics of recognition play themselves out.”
By integrating structure, agency and environment the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape
provides a more comprehensive framework for conceptualizing such dynamics.2 It offers a plausible answer to
the following question posed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998:964): “If structural contexts are analytically
separable from (and stand over and against) capacities for human agency, how is it possible for actors to
mediate or transform their own relationships to these contexts.” Within a socially constructed adaptive
landscape individual and corporate actors alter their structural and, I would add, environmental contexts by
employing various framing processes to mobilize resources, create and/or exploit political opportunities and
construct social boundaries in order to legitimate (or delegitimate) social forms at various levels of analysis.
Through such processes of niche construction actors transform their contexts of action by continually reshaping
and repartitioning the adaptive landscape and, thereby, changing the probabilities of survival and reproduction
of habits, roles, routines and organizations. The social and biophysical impacts of such shifts, in turn, create
opportunities for and impose constraints upon subsequent action. When they alter the adaptive landscape, actors
create the branching points of a dynamic, multi-linear and relational history.
Processes of legitimation (delegitimation) are thus central to understanding the dynamics of adaptive
landscapes. Legitimation occurs when new social structures come to be accepted as taken-for-granted. In terms
of the above framework, legitimation involves creating--as opposed to simply climbing--a new peak or fold in
the adaptive landscape. This interpretation of legitimation recognizes the need to integrate both structural and
cultural dynamics (Baum and Powell 1995) by combing the insights of institutional theory, organizational
ecology and constructivism. For instance, institutional theorists such as Meyer and Rowan (1977) argue that
achieving a taken-for-granted status allows individual organizations to obtain more resources and, thus, improve
their survival chances. Organizational ecologists have extended institutionalists’ arguments to populations of
organizations by demonstrating the connection between legitimation and systematic changes in founding and
disbanding rates (Hannan and Freeman 1989). However, although in their theoretical formulations they
acknowledge a role for agency and culture, in their empirical work organizational ecologists tend to gloss over
the complex internal and external projects engaged in by both individual and corporate actors to legitimate new
organizational forms (McLaughlin and Khawaja 2000). A more active and historical account of legitimation
requires additional insights from the constructivist tradition.
The constructivist literature on social movements emphasizes the critical role that injustice frames play in
social movements’ attempts to challenge dominant ideologies (Snow et al. 1986). The values, beliefs and
meanings embedded in dominant ideologies invariably reflect the interests of powerful actors. As Dietz and
Burns (1992) note, powerful actors can not only determine what rules are applied in a given situation but, over
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time, change the distribution of rules to favor their own interests. In terms of the above evolutionary framework,
this implies that powerful actors have a greater ability to shape the contours of adaptive landscapes. However,
the legitimacy of the social structures, practices and meanings underwritten by a dominant ideology are always
precarious and contested (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Oliver-Smith 1996). Injustice frames embodying
contending visions of a just and desirable society are continually created and/or persist in various social
movement abeyance structures (Taylor 1989). When mobilized, such frames have the potential to transform
societies and their associated biophysical environments by changing the number, location or height of peaks on
adaptive landscapes.3
Social movements are most likely to emerge when individual and corporate actors conclude that a dominant
ideology is no longer providing solutions to changing political, economic, or environmental problems. As
Ellingson (1995) notes, actors continually assess the legitimacy of cultural assumptions in relation to ongoing
events. Thus, what is considered “natural” or “normal” in a given society may shift in response to political and
economic events, changes in knowledge and technology as well as the ongoing experience of environmental
variability (Oliver-Smith 1986). The weakening of a dominant ideology creates spaces in the social landscape
where actors can elaborate injustice frames which not only redefine "what was previously seen as an
unfortunate but tolerable situation...as inexcusable, unjust, or immoral" (Snow et al. 1986:474) but also provide
a diagnosis of the problem, a proposed solution, and a rationale for taking action (Snow and Benford 1988). The
creation of an injustice frame entails the formation of a distinct network of individuals who espouse a new
symbolic reality. Such networks provide a basis for constructing social movement organizations (SMO’s) that
embody the new frame (Clemens 1993) and use it to challenge the prevailing discourse and it’s taken-forgranted interpretations of the physical, biological, and social world.
Constructing new SMO’s and realizing broader social movement goals requires the mobilization of
participants and other resources. Social movements employ various frame-alignment processes–e.g., frame
bridging, amplification, extension and transformation (Snow et al. 1986)–to persuade actors to join and/or
contribute resources to the movement. Resources are critical to social movement success (Jenkins 1983;
McCarthy and Zald 1977) because resources translate into social power and social power, as noted, implies the
ability to remold the contours of adaptive landscapes. Social movements employ this leverage in the first
instance to construct a niche for the social movement itself. As a movement gains legitimacy the height of the
landscape supporting its various habits, roles, routines and organizations is raised. Second, social movements
apply resources to reshape the broader evolutionary terrain--e.g., by changing the normative environments of
other organizations or lobbying the government to pass new legislation--in ways that reflect their interests and
values. Nevertheless, adaptive landscapes and the boundaries that partition them are not infinitely pliable. The
ability of social movements to effect change must be measured against existing political opportunities. As
Tarrow (1998) notes, various factors--divided elites, influential allies, political access, shifting political
alignments and repression/facilitation–all influence the vulnerability of governments and elites to new claims.
Finally, although I have used the constructivist literature on social movements to describe how actors
modify adaptive landscapes, I believe that the processes and concepts identified can be applied to both
movement and non-movement sectors as well as interactions between them. As Dally (1991:100) argues, “the
economy, like all other spheres, is the terrain of a political struggle, and is governed not by a single logic but by
a proliferation of discourses/language games.”4
Partitioning Adaptive Landscapes. New habits, roles, routines and organizations cannot attain a taken-forgranted status unless they are first seen as distinct. Thus, in order to achieve legitimacy, new social forms must
be clearly demarcated through the construction of social boundaries. Lamont and Molnar (2002) argue that
social boundaries are created when actors translate the conceptual distinctions they use to categorize
components of the natural and social world into well-defined networks of social interaction. Processes of
boundary construction (deconstruction) can occur on multiple levels of analysis. Actors are constantly
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promulgating new forms of property rights, creating various in-group/out-group comparisons, notions of
purity/impurity and distinctions of taste and lifestyle to shape collective identities and to construct racial, gender
and class categories (Alvarez 1995; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Hodgson 1999). Hannan and Freeman
(1986) discuss the role of boundary construction in the legitimation of new organizational forms.
Such a moderate constructivist perspective, which conceptualizes categories as bounded networks
(McLaughlin 2001), provides a crucial link between the dynamics of adaptive landscapes and questions of
adaptation and vulnerability to climate change. In negotiating and contesting boundaries on multiple levels of
analysis actors draw upon legal traditions, cultural repertoires and narratives to fabricate new distinctions in a
continuous struggle to defend or redefine the current partitioning of adaptive landscapes. The point of these
boundary struggles which invariably accompany the legitimation of new social forms is to exclude other actors
from the resources being assembled in a newly constructed niche (Tilly 1998). By privileging certain actors
while marginalizing others social boundaries play a critical role in determining levels of poverty and inequality
by differentially distributing entitlements across populations (Sen 1981). A lack of entitlements can
significantly impact adaptive capacity, thereby increasing vulnerability to climate change and other natural
hazards.
Climate Change, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Adaptation to Climate Change. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape forces us to
relocate the question of adaptation to climate change within a broader historical and theoretical context.
Adaptation to climate change is not a new phenomenon. Rather it is the latest phase of a process of societalenvironment interaction that has been ongoing for millennia. Thus, the causes of climate change as well as
questions of mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability should all be conceptualized within a common theoretical
framework. They all represent alternative outcomes of the same four mechanisms of adaptation--homeostatic,
developmental, rational choice and populational--discussed above. The concept of a socially constructed
adaptive landscape can help us to integrate these mechanisms and identify the conditions under which their joint
operation leads to each of these respective outcomes.
For instance, from the above evolutionary perspective, understanding the root causes and driving forces
responsible for climate change requires, among other things, that we identify the dominant ideology that has
shaped the adaptive landscapes of organizations for the last two centuries. McLaughlin and Khawaja (2000)
have argued that, prior to the emergence of the environmental movement, the dominant ideology within the
United States, and arguably the rest of the “developed” world, was Manifest Destiny. This ideology consisted of
an amalgam of an anti-environmental interpretation of Christianity (White 1967), a cultural belief in progress
(Catton and Dunlap 1980) and the patriarchal assumptions underlying Francis Bacon’s program of scientific
research (Keller 1985). These mutually reinforcing ideas provided a common rhetoric used to legitimate the
thousands of distinct forms of organization, and their associated lifestyles, that are responsible for climate
change and other global environmental problems. These same dynamics are implicated in the processes of
boundary construction and marginalization that underlie current patterns of vulnerability (see below). To give
just one example, in the 1980's the Brazilian government used its own version of Manifest Destiny to legitimate
the spread of cattle ranching in the Amazon. The proliferation of these organizations not only reduced
biodiversity and increased carbon dioxide emissions through the cutting and burning of virgin forest, they also
increased the vulnerability of local Indian and Seringueiro populations by undermining their livelihoods (Hecht
and Cockburn 1990).
Mitigating climate change will require the use of both existing and newly created collective action frames to
mobilize resources to challenge this dominant ideology by radically reshaping the contours of adaptive
landscapes. Specifically we will need to change the number, location and height of peaks on various landscapes
in order to delegitimate environmentally destructive forms of activity while simultaneously legitimating more
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sustainable habits, roles, routines and organizations that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Hart 2007; Ostrom
2005). Such changes would come about through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational
mechanisms of adaptation. As is common in revolutions and reform movements, these changes may also entail
the creation of entirely new forms of organization and the complete elimination of some existing forms-including attendant process of boundary construction and deconstruction (Hannan and Freeman 1987).
However, as noted above, powerful actors often have a vested interest in the status quo and the capacity to
thwart efforts to modify evolutionary terrains. For example, Finan (2003) has shown how large landowners in
Northeastern Brazil have succeeded in turning drought relief payments and climate forecasts to their own
advantage. Thus, a critical research question that needs to be addressed in this context, is how variations in the
different dimensions of political opportunity across countries and time periods facilitate or constrain attempts to
reconfigure adaptive landscapes.
How elites and publics interpret environmental events induced by climate change will likely play a critical
role in altering such political opportunities (Ellingson 1995). While political process theorists invariably focus
on how social, economic and political events impact political opportunity structures, natural disasters and other
environmental changes can also destabilize (or reinforce) existing power relations (Hoffman 1999a, 1999b;
Oliver-Smith 1986). As Oliver-Smith (2004:18) notes, “hazards and disasters demonstrate the exo-semiotic
agency of nature.” Thus, climate induced impacts and disasters may not only call into question established
values and proliferate new meanings (Oliver-Smith 1996), they may also transform political opportunity
structures by dividing or uniting elites, changing the structure of alliances, increasing or decreasing political
access, shifting political alignments or calling forth repression or facilitation by governments (Tarrow 1998). 5
When political opportunities open, even marginalized groups may gain the capacity to affect political outcomes
by altering the probabilities of survival and reproduction of social forms at various levels of analysis.
The dynamics of boundary construction and deconstruction within social movements also will play a critical
role in efforts to mitigate climate change. For instance, social movement organizations advocating for
sustainability must define and defend boundaries around themselves in order to stand out against the
background of both competitors and opponents in their organizational field. As social movements mature they
often diversify into submovements. Benford (1993) argues that distinct submovements typically emerge in
response to “frame disputes”--i.e., disagreements over diagnoses of, solutions to and rhetorical strategies
employed by competing SMO’s. Such boundary dynamics play a critical role not only in shaping the structure
and diversity within social movements but also in determining their overall effectiveness. Movements torn by
frame disputes become weak and fragmented (Frey, Dietz and Kalof 1992; Rucht 1989), while diverse
movements that maintain “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) between submovements are generally more effective.
To the extent that mitigation efforts succeed, adaptation to anthropomorphic climate change will be
unnecessary. However, since even the most optimistic projections suggest that mitigation efforts will not
prevent significant climate change in coming decades (Parry et al. 2007:71), mitigation and adaptation efforts
will need to be pursued simultaneously. As Adger et al. (2009:3) note, at a localize level adaptation and
mitigation efforts “are invariably intertwined and feed into each other. ” Indeed, from an organizational
perspective this should be expected since the most significant dimension of any organization’s environment is
typically other organizations (Scott 2003). The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can help to
conceptualize and model interactions between both mechanisms of adaptation and organizational populations.
For instance, organizational ecologists (Hannan and Freeman 1989) have shown how major institutional, legal
or policy shifts resulting from rational planning can be incorporated into dynamic models (Tuma and Hannan
1984) of organizational founding, disbanding, merger or change using period-effect variables. Likewise,
interactions between organizational populations--e.g., cattle ranches and Seringueiro rubber estates in the
Amazon--could be modeled using cross-effect variables which measure how the changing density of one
population impacts the vital rates of another. The human and organizational dynamics resulting from policy and
technological interventions--e.g., development induced displacements resulting from dam construction
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(Baviskar 2001; Cernea and McDowell 2000)--related to mitigation and adaptation efforts could be modeled
using similar techniques.
Climate change also will affect the population dynamics of habits, roles, routines and organizations by
changing the magnitude or timing of various environmental parameters–e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea
level, storm frequency and intensity, freshwater availability, the distribution of disease vectors, species ranges,
crop productivity, etc. Such changes will directly, or through intermediate mechanisms, shift the number,
location or height of various peaks of adaptive landscapes, altering the probabilities of survival of social units in
space and time. Some of these changes, for example regime shifts in ecosystems (Peterson 2009), may be
sudden and dramatic. The speed and magnitude of changes will be critical in determining whether adaptation
occurs primarily through changes at the level of individual social units or through differential survival at the
population level of analysis. Understanding the latter dynamics will be particularly critical given the well
known limitations of rational decision making (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Simon 1997) and the likelihood that
the level of accuracy and precision necessary for adjustment to climate change solely through calculative
mechanisms is unlikely to be obtained (Desai et al. 2009).
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can contribute in a number of ways to the
development of the robust adaptive strategies that Desai et al. (2009) argue will be needed to cope with such
intractable uncertainties. First, an evolutionary framework, which conceptualizes social change as occurring
primarily through trial and error, is consistent with newly emerging experimentalist approaches to
environmental governance (Overdevest et al. Forthcoming). These approaches reject the notion that
environmental policy must be predicated upon a Godlike ability to predict future conditions as well as the
associated urge to rationally control and dominate nature.6 Instead they take the limits of human cognition in
relation to the complexity and uncertainty of societal-environment interaction as an epistemological given and
argue that acknowledging such limitations in no way implies an incapacity to make decisions. Rather, drawing
on the pragmatist tradition, advocates of experimentalist governance argue that these limitations can be
overcome by stimulating local innovation, problem solving and learning through public experiments which
allow for, and even embrace, the possibility of surprises and which seek to increase democratic accountability
by encouraging shared responsibility and the involvement of all stakeholders.7
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape could be used to theorize alternative goals and
strategies within an experimentalist system of governance, the interaction between various mechanisms of
adaptation, the reciprocal affects among the vital rates of organizational populations, as just discussed, how
alternative sets of values embedded in competing frames may be used to mobilize resources to reshape the
landscape, how obstacles to adaptation--e.g., conceptualized as valleys between peaks--might be removed
through policy interventions, how political opportunities and other contextual forces can constrain or facilitate
such efforts and so on.8
Vulnerability to Climate Change. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can also help
address some of the conceptual and theoretical challenges currently facing the field of vulnerability research.
The first challenge is a lack of agreement on the scientific meaning of vulnerability (Birkmann 2006). Part of
the difficulty here is the diversity of entities--individuals, groups, communities, ecosystems--that are posited to
be vulnerable to climate change or other natural hazards. A second challenge relates to the shortcomings of the
frameworks being put forward to conceptualize vulnerability. For instance, after discussing a series of analytical
models of vulnerability, Birkmann (2006:68) concludes that we need “more comprehensive and holistic
approaches that take into account the dynamic nature of vulnerability as well as” the “underlying causal factors
of vulnerability at different levels for different hazards.” However, as noted above, some of the broader
theoretical frameworks associated with these analytical models themselves suffer from deficiencies derived
from the metatheoretical strategies--i.e., essentialism and nominalism--on which they are premised
(McLaughlin and Dietz 2008).
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By locating vulnerability within an evolutionary framework that integrates structure, agency and
environment, the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can help clarify the meaning of
vulnerability and its relationship to adaptation. It can also facilitate our understanding of the root causes and
driving forces that contribute to vulnerability. Within the context of a socially constructed adaptive landscape
vulnerability can be conceptualized as resulting from the adaptive failure of the social structures--habits, roles,
routines, organizations--that sustain individual and collective health, livelihood and well being (Oliver-Smith
1996). Unpacking this statement requires that we first specify which exposure unit is the focus of concern
(Clark et al. 2000). For instance, if the concern is with the vulnerability of a specific social form per se–e.g.,
farms–then vulnerability is inversely related to the fitness of that form. If the concern is with a particular human
population–e.g., farmers–than their vulnerability will be negatively correlated with the fitnesses of the social
structures on which they rely for their livelihood. The argument here bears a direct relation to Sen’s (1983:754)
notion of entitlements–i.e., “the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society
using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces.” As Sen (1981) suggests, shifts in entitlements
reflect changes in the legitimacy/viability of various productive social roles, routines and organizations in
response to variations in the social, economic, political and biophysical environment. However, as Fraser (2003)
notes, Sen’s entitlement approach tends to treat the biophysical environment as static and gives insufficient
attention to the capacity of human agents to modify it.
The analysis of legitimation and boundary formation processes within socially constructed adaptive
landscapes provides a more dynamic framework for conceptualizing the relationship between entitlements and
vulnerability. Other things being equal, vulnerability is likely to be higher for individuals who have been, along
with the social structures on which they depend for their livelihoods, marginalized by previous iterations of
legitimation and boundary formation. Such actors are likely to find themselves in high risk environments and/or
with a limited entitlement set. As Torry (1979) notes, marginal locations generally imply a greater exposure to
risks. For example, poor people, women and lower status ethnic groups are more likely to have risks imposed
upon them–e.g., by being constrained to live in neighborhoods which host hazardous facilities, regions with
high levels of disease, poor soils, higher probabilities of landslides or, as dramatically illustrated by recent
events in Haiti, in housing that is ill-equiped to withstand earthquakes (Bullard 2005; Comfort et al. 1999;
Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004; Hodgson 1999; Pulwarty and Riebsame 1997; Tierney 1999). As political
ecologists emphasize, the restriction of populations to such marginal locations is often achieved through the
active construction and--sometimes violent--defense of social boundaries (Robbins 2004; Smith 2009).
A marginal location on an adaptive landscape also typically implies limited or unreliable access to
resources. As noted above, the point of the boundary struggles which accompany the legitimation of new social
forms is to exclude other actors from resources.9 The resulting lack or instability of entitlements place
restrictions on the number and types of short-term strategies--homeostatic, developmental or rational choice-that can be deployed in the face of shifts in adaptive landscapes. That is, poverty and inequality influence
baseline vulnerability (Adger 1999; Kawachi, Kennedy and Wilkinson 1999; Tarlov and St. Peter 2000;
Wilkinson 1996). Since poor people have the fewest assets, they reach the threshold of vulnerability first (Swift
1989). Moreover, marginality not only implies a greater sensitivity to environmental and other forms of change,
it generally entails a more limited resilience (Bohle 1993). Both increased sensitivity and lower resilience imply
that small shifts in adaptive landscapes can push a social unit below minimum levels of viability. A lack of
resources also implies a limited ability to adapt through longer-term populational strategies requiring the active
manipulation of adaptive landscapes.
Climate change is likely to increase risks and diminish or destabilize entitlements (Parry et al. 2007) for
those located in marginalized locations on adaptive landscapes. By changing the magnitude or timing of various
environmental parameters–e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea level, storm frequency and intensity, freshwater
availability, the distribution of disease vectors, species ranges, crop productivity etc.--it may collapse peaks on
landscapes or shift their location at rates that exceed the capacity of homeostatic, developmental, rational choice
11
or even populational mechanisms to compensate. Moreover, as Downing (1991) notes, how the climate change
debate itself is framed may, in some cases, be more important than the actual environmental impacts themselves
because it may induce shifts in government policies or market processes that affect comparative advantage. The
impacts on marginalized groups and regions also may be exacerbated by double exposures created by
synergisms between climate change and globalization (O’Brien and Leichenko 2000).
The above comments provide only a first link between vulnerability and the dynamics of adaptive
landscapes. They are useful but very broad generalizations. The difficulty is, of course, that other things are
rarely equal. Although one generally would expect lower founding rates and/or higher disbanding rates of social
forms in marginal areas of adaptive landscapes, we would also expect considerable variability in those rates.
First, even amongst the poor there will be differences in the accumulation of natural, economic, human, cultural
and social capitals (Dow 1999). Likewise, as Chambers (1989) notes, and an evolutionary perspective would
lead one to expect, the poor exhibit a great diversity in livelihood and coping strategies. For instance, Bates and
Pelanda (1994) argue that individual actors play multiple roles, some of which may be embedded in higherlevel collectivities–e.g., an economically diversified household unit. Participation in such systems can buffer
individuals from the direct impact of, say, a job loss resulting from an economic downturn. The loss of a work
role by one member of a household can shift the adaptive problem from the individual to the whole household.
Households, in turn, may try to insulate themselves from crises by participating in formal and informal social
security mechanisms (McCabe 2002), placing the adaptive burden yet higher. Severe or sustained
environmental or economic crises may eventually lead to adaptive failure on all of these levels (Sharp and
Devereux 2004), resulting in distress migration, complete reliance on outside aid and varying degrees of human
morbidity and mortality (Dirks 1980).
The relationship between vulnerability and the fitnesses of social structures at various levels of analysis is,
thus, complex and dynamic. However, properly developed, I believe the concept of a socially constructed
adaptive landscape can contribute to our understanding of that complexity. By providing an alternative, nonessentialist framework for conceptualizing the “long-term structural and historical processes by which specific
patterns of entitlements and property rights come to be distributed” (Watts and Bohle 1993:48) it can provide a
conceptual bridge between the root causes and driving forces that underlie vulnerability and the levels of
vulnerability experienced by specific populations. It also can provide a framework for conceptualizing programs
and policies to reduce vulnerability by reducing levels of marginalization and inequality by modifying the
adaptive landscapes--including social boundaries--of existing organizations or by legitimating new, more
equitable and socially sustainable organizations--e.g., through social entrepreneurship (Bornstein 2007) or the
promotion of cooperatives or social businesses (Yunus 2007). Moreover, these processes could be modeled
using the same dynamic methods discussed above with regard to adaptation to climate change (Tuma and
Hannan 1984)
Conclusion
Questions of adaptation and vulnerability are increasingly central to the field of climate change research. In
this paper, I explored how an evolutionary theory of social change, premised on the concept of a socially
constructed adaptive landscape, can provide a new perspective for conceptualizing these issues while avoiding
the pitfalls associated with essentialist and nominalist approaches to theorizing societal-environment interaction
(McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). This perspective provides an integrated framework for conceptualizing societalenvironment interaction that is conceptually robust and capable of incorporating organizational sociologists’
insights into structure-environment interaction, constructivists’ attention to agency, language, culture and values
as well as political ecologists concerns with power, inequality and processes of marginalization. The concept of
a socially constructed adaptive landscape can be employed to conceptualize not only adaptation and
vulnerability to climate change but the underlying causes of climate change itself as well as attempts to mitigate
its impacts. Each represents alternative outcomes of an ongoing process of societal-environment interaction
12
occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational mechanisms at different levels
of analysis. Properly developed, this framework would be capable of generating more specific models and
hypotheses that could be tested using a variety of qualitative and quantitative--including dynamic modeling-methods.
In political and pragmatic terms, the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape stakes out a
“middle ground between structural inevitability and voluntaristic optimism regarding our environmental future”
(Buttel 1996:73). Because it conceptualizes history as inherently open-ended, multi-linear and relational, it does
not contain a built-in bias toward either inevitable environmental deterioration or improvement. Likewise, while
this concept recognizes the centrality of agency to the analysis of adaptation and vulnerability, it does not give
agency unlimited scope (Dietz and Burns 1992). Thus, mitigating, adapting to or reducing vulnerability to
climate change requires that individual and corporate actors committed to change develop alternative collective
action frames, and use those frames to mobilize the resources necessary to reshape and repartition the adaptive
landscape. Whether such attempts are successful or not in a given instance, will depend, as DiMaggio (1988:13)
notes, on “the relative power of organized interests,” as well as the shifting constellation of political
opportunities and the dynamics of the biophysical environment itself. In any of these cases, the metaphor of a
contested evolutionary terrain underscores the point that questions of mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability
are inherently political and moral (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004).
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17
1
Two points need to be emphasized. First, fitness is a frame-relative rather than a frame-invariant concept
(Sober 1980). That is, as in the biological case, the fitness of a particular social form cannot be defined
independently of context. A social characteristic that has a high fitness in one context may have extremely low
fitness in another. Second, fitness is a descriptive rather than a normative concept. Viewed from alternative
moral or political standpoints, a given social form may be laudable or reprehensible. While processes of
negotiation and contestation over values and beliefs play a central role in determining what social forms are fit
in a given context, fitness does not determine what forms should be valued. Rather it only describes the
outcome of such processes of negotiation in terms of the differential reproduction of social forms.
2
In saying that adaptive landscapes are “socially constructed” I do not mean that they are merely reifications or
in any sense not real. Rather, I simply mean that both the shape and partitioning of landscapes are the products
of individual and corporate actors who are acting on the basis of perceptions filtered through specific cultural
frames. That is, I am employing a moderate form of constructivism which conceptualizes social categories as
bounded networks (McLaughlin 2001; McLaughlin and Dietz 2008).
3
By providing a clear theoretical link between cultural frames and framing processes and the dynamics of
social structure--in the form of changing probabilities of survival and reproduction of habits, roles, routines and
organizations--the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape helps to explain “…how narrative and
text matter and how categories and the apprehension of knowledge is linked to ecological change” (Robbins
1998:72).
4 Although space limitations prevent me from doing so here, concepts derived from actor-network theory
(Callon 1986; Latour 1987) might also be used to conceptualize the legitimation of new social forms within
adaptive landscapes.
5
Note the parallel between the concept of political opportunity in sociology and the notion of ecological
opportunity in evolutionary theory (see Schluter 2003).
6
Indeed, both of these requirements reflect the assumptions underlying the ideology of Manifest Destiny,
particular Bacon’s belief that “feminine” nature is simple and passive and thus easily understood and dominated
by “masculanized” science (Keller 1985).
7
See Hart’s (2007) discussion of low cost probes and experimentation in the development of sustainable
businesses as well as Yunus (2007) on the role of experimentation in constructing social businesses.
8
Although the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape is consistent with, it is in no way dependent
upon an experimentalist approach to environmental governance. It could equally well be used to explain how
powerful actors can use their resources, influence and ability to manipulate cultural frames to maintain the
status quo by preventing the institutionalization of such a system of governance. The explicit intention of
experimentalist governance it to undermine the role of such elite action (Overdevest et al. forthcoming) by
increasing political access and, thus, opening political opportunity structures. By doing so it would promote
change by increasing the flexibility of the adaptive landscapes of various organizational forms. Although I
personally am supportive of such a political stance, unlike experimentalist approaches to governance which
contain a prescriptive element derived from Habermas’ (1987) theory of communicative action, the concept of a
socially constructed adaptive landscape is intended to be a purely descriptive theory.
9
As Geiryn (1999) emphasizes, such “boundary-work” also occurs within the domain of science itself and plays
a key role in establishing the epistemic authority, legitimacy and access to resources of “scientific” versus “nonscientific” knowledge systems as well as alternative theoretical frameworks within science (Dietz, Stern and
Rycroft 1989). Such dynamics should be a central focus of vulnerability research.
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