This thesis aims to explore whether and how the frequency and severity of climate-related hazards are associated with changes in adaptive capacity. Despite increased hazard frequency and severity in the world, it is still contested whether hazard frequency and severity are associated with changes in adaptive capacity, often referred to as the preconditions necessary to enable adaptation. The ‘disaster-reform’ position holds that increased frequency and severity can create critical junctures providing legitimacy for governmental action and windows of opportunity for change in adaptive capacity. The ‘conservative’ position holds that exposure to frequent and severe climate-related hazards tends to be overwhelming and create a policy environment where change is unlikely. It further argues that exposure can hinder change in adaptive capacity due to the complexity in maintaining public support long enough for substantial changes in adaptive capacity since initial improvements can be perceived as successes. The method of choice to explore the association is linear regression analysis on the correlation between the frequency and severity of climate-related hazards measured in the International Disasters Database 2008-2016 and changes in adaptive measured in the World Risk Index for 180 countries in 2011-2019. This study shows that climate-related hazard frequency and severity are generally unassociated with adaptive capacity change in line with the ‘conservative’ position. Despite the lack of a global correlation, some countries deviate from the pattern by having significant improvements in adaptive capacity after exposure to frequent and severe climate-related hazards, thus confirming the ‘disaster-reform’ position. In addition to supporting the ‘conservative’ position, these results highlight the potential for future studies on the causal mechanisms behind the countries deviating from the overall pattern.

Our world is more technologically advanced and interdependent, risks are increasingly shared across local, regional and national boundaries and we are more culturally diverse than ever before. As a result, communities are increasingly confronted with emergencies and crises which challenge their social and economic stability. To be resilient, communities rely on services and employment provided by organisations, to enable them to plan for, respond to, and recover from emergencies and crises. However organisational and community resilience are two sides of the same coin; if organisations are not prepared to respond to emergencies and crises, communities too are not prepared. Resilient organisations are also better poised to develop competitive advantage. However despite the potential business and performance rewards of becoming more resilient, organisations struggle to prioritise resilience and to allocate resources to resilience, which could be put to more immediate use. To enable organisations to invest in their resilience, the business case for resilience must be better than the case for new equipment or new staff. This thesis develops a methodology and survey tool for measuring and benchmarking organisational resilience. Previous qualitative case study research is reviewed and operationalised as a resilience measurement tool. The tool is tested on a random sample of Auckland organisations and factor analysis is used to further develop the instrument. The resilience benchmarking methodology is designed to guide organisations’ use of the resilience measurement tool and its incorporation into business-as-usual continuous improvement. Significant contributions of this thesis include a new model of organisational resilience, the resilience measurement tool, and the resilience benchmarking methodology. Together these outputs translate the concept of resilience for organisations and provide information on resilience strengths and weaknesses that enable them to proactively address their resilience and to develop a business case for resilience investment.

The organizational structure of Holacracy has been gaining popularity in recent years, but a lack of academic research on Holacracy called for a systematic approach to assessing its merits and shortcomings. The need Holacracy fills, is that of organizations dealing with a complex world and rapidly evolving technology. While Holacracy is not tailored to address sustainability issues, there are many components that made it a candidate for the researchers to examine it through a social sustainability lens. This study examines the effect of specific components of Holacracy with elements of adaptive capacity – a theory from which the research definition of social sustainability was built. With the goal of determining the effect of Holacracy on social sustainability, a questionnaire directed at employees and practitioners of holacratic organizations was utilized. The findings implied that Holacracy does positively influence the experience of the elements of adaptive capacity; with the relationship to the adaptive capacity element of self-organization being a standout. The importance of trust is also identified. The link to the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development can be elucidated through adaptive capacity’s influence to the social sustainability principles. Because of the importance of social sustainability and social capital to organizational performance and longevity, this research is of value to any business using, or considering using Holacracy.

The benefits of public participation in water management are recognized by governments, scholars, and stakeholders. These benefits, however, do not result from all engagement endeavors. This leads to the question: What are the determinants for effective public participation? Given a list of criteria for achieving the transformational capacity of participation, we analyze the benefits (including the influence on public policies) gained through public participation and the determinant factors for obtaining these benefits in the Ebro River Basin in Spain and in the Tucson Basin in Arizona (U.S.). Furthermore, and considering that droughts and floods are major water management challenges in both case studies, we focus on the potential of participation to build adaptive capacity. Our analysis of these case studies concludes that influence on public policies is determined more by the context of the participatory process, i.e., legal framework, political leadership, and social awareness, whereas influence on adaptive capacity building depends more on the characteristics of the participatory process, particularly the existence of active on-site consultation and deliberation.

In the context of still uncertain specific effects of climate change in specific locations, this paper examines whether education significantly increases coping capacity with regard to particular climatic changes, and whether it improves the resilience of people to climate risks in general. Our hypothesis is that investment in universal primary and secondary education around the world is the most effective strategy for preparing to cope with the still uncertain dangers associated with future climate. The empirical evidence presented for a cross-country time series of factors associated with past natural disaster fatalities since 1980 in 125 countries confirms this overriding importance of education in reducing impacts. We also present new projections of populations by age, sex, and level of educational attainment to 2050, thus providing an appropriate tool for anticipating societies' future adaptive capacities based on alternative education scenarios associated with different policies. (authors' abstract)

In Sweden, the indigenous Sami have exclusive rights to reindeer husbandry, which continues to provide for a minority of Sami in economically and culturally significant ways. However, the Sami have faced longstanding challenges including marginalization within Swedish society, competing interests from multiple industries, a diminishing land base and environmental changes impacting the herds. Meanwhile, gender relations within Sami communities have changed since the mid-19th century as a result of Swedish policies and other factors. These ecological and social changes have impacted the capacity of Sami communities to adapt to dynamic environmental conditions. While researchers have focused attention on the contribution of “adaptive capacity” (AC) to the resilience of local communities, there is relatively little attention given to Sami populations in Scandinavia. Furthermore, studies regarding AC at the community level generally consider communities as homogenous entities, with little attention paid to how gender relations affect the AC of communities. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to address this gap and to inform gender-sensitive policy and practice in resource-based communities. My study developed a framework for AC that is sensitive to the lifestyle of reindeer herders in Sweden. Data were collected from 81 questionnaires, 9 interviews and other relevant documents, for each of the 51 reindeer herding districts in Sweden. From these sources, I traced contributions of Sami women and men while also exploring changes in AC over time. The results of the study show that the contribution of cultural and economic capitals to AC is strong among the Sami while the contribution of institutional and natural capitals is weaker. |Both men and women have contributed to their AC and the transformation of their communities, each making unique contributions. The results suggest that herders are proactive in directing the transformation of their society towards one that embraces contemporary technology and opportunities, while maintaining values that support a longstanding cultural tradition. These findings suggest that isolating gendered inputs to adaptation may help create more specific targets for increasing capacity while augmenting their overall effectiveness and efficiency.

The urban centres are becoming more vulnerable to climate change because of the rapid urbanization and the inequality of urban development. This study assesses the urban vulnerability in an integrated approach focusing the slum people as the targeted group. The slum people are severely exposed to climate risks in terms of city‟s overall development. The negative indications of the indicators of person‟s vulnerability represent their high sensitivity to the adverse impact of climate change. The determinants of adaptive capacity also confirm that the slum people are more vulnerable to climate change with having lower adaptive capacity; though, the city is possessing high development indexes. In this context, an institutional structure is developed to build multi-level urban climate governance with the involvement of all relevant stakeholders based on the case study and literature review to integrate the vulnerable group in development planning for climate change adaptation.

abstract: Understanding the resilience of water management systems is critical for the continued existence and growth of communities today, in urban and rural contexts alike. In recent years, many studies have evaluated long-term human-environmental interactions related to water management across the world, highlighting both resilient systems and those that eventually succumb to their vulnerabilities. To understand the multitude of factors impacting resilience, scholars often use the concept of adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is the ability of actors in a system to make adaptations in anticipation of and in response to change to minimize potential negative impacts. In this three-paper dissertation, I evaluate the adaptive capacity of the water management systems of two medieval Khmer cities, located in present-day Cambodia, over the course of centuries. Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire for over 600 years (9 th -15 th centuries CE), except for one brief period when the capital was relocated to Koh Ker (921 – 944 CE). These cities both have massive water management systems that provide a comparative context for studying resilience; while Angkor thrived for hundreds of years, Koh Ker was occupied as the capital of the empire for a relatively short period. In the first paper, I trace the chronological and spatial development of two types of settlement patterns (epicenters and lower-density temple-reservoir settlement units) at Angkor in relation to state-sponsored hydraulic infrastructure. In the second and third papers, I conduct a diachronic analysis using empirical data for the adaptive capacity of the water management systems at both cities. The results suggest that adaptive capacity is useful for identifying causal factors in the resilience and failures of systems over the long term. The case studies also demonstrate the importance and warn of the danger of large centralized water management features. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2018

Developing countries must concurrently develop while also adapting to climate change; if not, the challenges of poverty alleviation are likely exacerbated. One response has been an emergence of literature emphasizing various approaches that address climate adaptation and development. There are approaches that focus on: climate-specific impacts, addressing underlying vulnerability of households or the resiliency of systems. Taken separately, these approaches have significant weaknesses, but a combined assessment of general and climate specific capacities at system and household scales, the adaptive development capacities framework, is promising. This framework is captured in a matrix that illustrates the presence of these capacities and thereby provides a basis for considering the relative importance and the interaction of climate-specific and general capacities at multiple scales. The framework has the potential to provide a nuanced, yet clear understanding of the extent that climate-adaptive development is occurring. This is important because there is a weak understanding of the interaction and relative importance of adaptive development capacities at multiple scales in developing countries. This thesis research sets out to operationalize the adaptive development framework (Eakin, Lemos and Nelson 2014) (when the research began, this framework had not yet been operationalized). This qualitative research project addresses this gap by focusing on coastal Cambodia. Cambodia is actively pursuing economic development through a range of policies, including developing a series of Special Economic Zones. For example, my case focuses on a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) located near the Thai border (between the border and a secondary coastal city, known as Koh Kong town) that began employing thousands of workers in 2012. At the same-time, Cambodia has ambitious climate adaptation policies, that include a coastal focus. Since the climate-adaptation and development effects of the SEZ, specifically its employment, are unknown, this case provides a strong setting for testing the adaptive development capacities framework. In this way, the SEZ is a window into better understanding the presence and interaction of adaptive development capacities across household and system scales. This thesis begins by introducing the research topic, research questions and adaptive development framework. The research methods are clearly detailed, before turning to an understanding of climate change within the context of broader environmental change in Koh Kong. Fisheries decline, coastal erosion and drinking water shortages are being driven by a series of drivers including off-shore fishing, sand-mining, mangrove loss, and urban growth in the coastal area, and these drivers are being exacerbated by the increasing effects of climate change in Koh Kong. Climate change risks include sea-level rise, increasing drought and more extreme and frequent storms. Turning to the adaptive development capacity of systems, this research uncovered no climate-specific capacities in Koh Kong’s industrial, urban and migration systems. Most problematically, the city is being developed without consideration of the climate change risks posed by sea-level rise and increased drought. This has already led to seasonal piped water shortages as the water demand pressures of factories, population growth, along with prolonged dry seasons, leads to insufficient water. The uneven quality of urban systems, and the variation in climate exposure, means that the residential location of households contributes to varying degrees of household adaptive development capacity. Although these systems lack climate-specific capacity, there is a high level of development capacity in the industrial system due to relatively high and predictable wages and a good working environment in this particular SEZ, in comparison to elsewhere in Cambodia. Linked to the strength of the SEZ as an employer, households – particularly those with females between 18-25 –are able to temporarily diversify or compliment their livelihoods from climate-exposed fisheries and farming towards the higher and more predictable wages of SEZ employment where there is minimal climate exposure. This means that although the Koh Kong’s systems lack specific climate adaptive capacity, households are able to use their agency to move towards a greater degree of adaptive development. However, not all households are able to achieve the same degree of climate adaptive capacity, and the timing of such adaptive capacity is very specific (the SEZ only hires women between 18-25). While local fishing households are optimally placed to take advantage of the proximity of the SEZ and their surplus female labour, migrant farming households face the higher costs of migration and greater female labour opportunity costs. Looking within households, the very high rate of female employment at the SEZ means that adaptive development is uneven across households. While the strengthening of household adaptive development capacity through time-sensitive SEZ employment is encouraging, in the long-term, the lack of adaptive capacity in Koh Kong’s systems could significantly limit or undermine these gains. Of concern is the pressure that industrialization, urban growth and migration are placing on Koh Kong’s urban water system, land-use practices and planning processes that are not able to address current environmental concerns, nor climate change risks. This creates the conditions for emerging vulnerabilities, and demonstrates the limits of household adaptive development capacity. These findings demonstrate the value of the adaptive development framework in articulating the forms and scales of capacity needed for adaptive development.

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