Adaptive capacity is essential for organisations to be able to adapt to the sustainability challenge, and change its course. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an interpersonal communication tool that enables a user to move from a language of judgements to a language of needs by using 4 steps: observation, feelings, needs, and request. As communication is essential to the adaptive capacity of a social system, this thesis explores the question: How does Nonviolent Communication support the adaptive capacity of organisations? Through a mixed methods approach (semi-structured interviews and surveys with NVC trainers, organisational representatives and employees), the effects of NVC on communication in 3 sample organisations in the Netherlands (a school, NGO and research institute), is explored. Quantitative survey results show that NVC has a positive to very positive effect on common organisational communication dynamics. Qualitative data supports this finding and shows that NVC brings positive effects of increased understanding, listening, and progress in work related issues through an increased awareness of one’s own and other’s needs and feelings. When linking these results to adaptive capacity of organisations, it is concluded that NVC directly supports the adaptive capacity elements of trust, diversity and learning, and indirectly supports common meaning and self-organisation.

In the face of future uncertainties, many places are struggling with decisions about how to prepare for and adapt to climate change. The purpose of this research is to shed light on the concept of resilience, and uncover lessons for resilience-building exposed by a past disaster, Hurricane Wilma. The dissertation begins with an introduction (Chapter 1) detailing the research problem, key terms and overall research design. The study was conducted in three distinct phases. The first phase (Chapter 2), explored the concept of resilience to understand how it was defined in three South Florida communities. Content analyses of city and county documents were conducted to extract explicit definitions of resilience as well as implicit definitions based on carefully selected keywords. Results showed the engineering resilience concept was most prevalent across all three study areas. Furthermore, keywords related to the dimension of the built environment were most common in Broward and Lee Counties. While this may indicate a need for communities to shift toward more progressive, social-ecological conceptualizations of resilience, a more central conclusion was that local applications of resilience frameworks need to be more explicit about how they define resilience, and what resilience-building looks like in that particular context. Phase two (Chapter 3) explored the interplay between specified resilience, addressing resistance to known disturbances, and general resilience, addressing a system's capacity to deal with less predictable shocks. This phase entailed a content analysis of 172 Sun-Sentinel newspaper articles about Hurricane Wilma. Prominent themes that emerged included distribution of benefits and risks, social learning and memory, cross-scale issues, vulnerability and social networks. This chapter concludes with four specific recommendations for Broward County to enhance resilience to future storms and less predictable disturbances, like climate change and sea level rise. During the third phase (Chapter 4) a modified resilience activation framework was applied to analyze social factors that may limit or promote adaptive capacity in South Florida. Focus groups with homeowners were used to gain insight about past experiences with Hurricane Wilma, as well as perceptions and expectations regarding local climate adaptation efforts. Results showed that risk perceptions, insurance practices, and social networks may influence the willingness and ability of individuals to prepare for and adapt to disasters. Social limits to adaptation among participants included inaccurate risk perceptions based on past experiences and feelings of helplessness, and a lack of political trust at the state level. Social resources that can be leveraged to enhance adaptive capacity included knowledge reserves of long-term residents, strong bonding capital, and trust in local, non-elected government employees. Results from each phase of research were synthesized to create a novel procedural roadmap to guide how communities integrate resiliency into their planning documents.

Scientific evidence points to a changing global climate. The most vital and visible impacts of this phenomenon for sea-level communities are sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and more frequent severe coastal storms. However, limited research has been conducted to date to project the damage from rising maximum water levels and corresponding storm surges, and their impacts on the sustainability of coastal communities. This research focuses on the urban coastal community of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), Canada as part of the C-Change International Community University research Alliance (ICURA), “Managing Adaptation to Environmental Change in Coastal Communities: Canada and the Caribbean.” The stochastic process that underlies, maximum observed water levels in Charlottetown, is modeled using historical data. Maximum observed water levels and storm surges are represented by fitted conditional and marginal univariate probability density functions. The statistical package “Easy-Fit” is used as a tool for analyzing goodness of fit to the historical data for maximum observed water levels in Charlottetown. A System Dynamics (SD) model, using STELLA, is developed to simulate the projected impacts of maximum observed water levels on the City of Charlottetown. The SD model captures the dynamics of the four pillars of community sustainability, namely Environmental, Economic, Social-Cultural and Human sectors identified for the City of Charlottetown. The model defines and evaluates the robustness of alternative adaptation strategies for various model scenarios to projected storms over a long-term planning period. The results quantify the vulnerability of Charlottetown. The analysis of the results from implementing 3 main adaptation strategies for protection, accommodation, and retreat scenarios as well as the ones from the most common current response of “doing nothing”, provide information on the dynamic and pillar-related impacts of storms on Charlottetown. Analysis of these strategy options clearly indicates that doing nothing in the face of more frequent severe storms is an inefficient strategy. Model results show that the protect strategy is unlikely to deliver complete protection, and the retreat option is costly and not well received. The accommodation strategy including a combination of protection options and controlled retreat will provide the most robust option for the coastal City of Charlottetown. The SD model and analysis provides a framework for the evaluation of adaptation strategies for alternative coastal communities.

The focus of this research is on identifying the determinants of local-level climate change adaptive capacity in Caribbean small island communities. A single case study approach was employed to assess retrospectively both internal and external factors that contributed to the adaptive capacity of Paget Farm, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The Caribbean region’s first solar-powered desalination plant was implemented in the community specifically as a climate change adaptation strategy and thus provides an ideal case for retrospective analysis. A series of semi-structured interviews with local residents and key stakeholders revealed a number of interacting social and institutional factors that contribute to community-based adaptive capacity. Further analysis of institutional factors was undertaken using Social Network Analysis, which enabled visualization and quantification of vertical and horizontal institutional integration of the networks formed during different phases of project implementation. The research extends scholarly understanding of the determinants that influence local-level climate change adaptive capacity and provides practical evidence that can assist small island communities to respond to a changing climate.

abstract: Disasters represent disruptions to stability and offer lessons about how climate adaptation is negotiated and acted on. Viewing adaptation as a negotiation helps understand recovery not just as actions taken to minimize harm, but a reflection of values and motivations surrounding adaptation. This research elicits these perspectives and considers them as part of an ongoing agreement for disaster recovery and adaptation in Puerto Rico. Previous research has characterized recovery as an opportunity for rethinking societal arrangements for climate adaptation and highlights the importance of how adaptation is conceptualized across actors. This study builds on past research by using distinct perspectives to understand recovery as an adaptation process and a co-production of a new ‘social contract’ after Hurricane Maria. Community interviews and government documents are analyzed to understand who is involved, where change is happening, and what resources are necessary for success. The purpose of this is to consider distinct framings of recovery and adaptation, and what these contribute to long-term change. Community interviews give a perspective of local stability and show capacities for immediate and long-term recovery. Similarly, government documents discuss managing foundational vulnerabilities like infrastructure, while navigating recovery given geographical and economic obstacles. Findings show that self-organization and harnessing social capital are crucial components of recovery in the Corcovada community after Maria. They rely on bonding and bridging social capital to mobilize resources and reduce vulnerabilities for future threats. This transformative approach was also present in official recovery documents, though political and economic change were stressed as necessary for stability, along with modernizing infrastructure. While recovery documents suggest connecting physical and social resilience, community residents have cultivated this connection long before Maria. Unlike in Corcovada, the government of Puerto Rico is only starting to view disruptions as windows of opportunity and therefore mention plans for transformation but don’t present actions taken. Further, the reality of vulnerable infrastructural, political and economic systems greatly affects recovery both in Corcovada and across the island. Both perspectives will likely affect actions taken in Puerto Rico and recognizing these unique framings of stability can help design transformative, adaptive social contracts for facing future threats. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Sustainability 2019

abstract: Urban heat is a growing problem that impacts public health, water and energy use, and the economy and affects population subgroups differently. Exposure and sensitivity, two key factors in determining vulnerability, have been widely researched. This dissertation focuses on the adaptive capacity component of heat vulnerability at the individual, household, and community scale. Using a mixed methods approach and metropolitan Phoenix as a test site, I explored how vulnerable communities understand and adapt to increasing extreme urban heat to uncover adaptive capacity that is not being operationalized well through current heat vulnerability frameworks. Twenty-three open-ended interviews were conducted where residents were encouraged to tell their stories about past and present extreme heat adaptive capacity behaviors. A community-based participatory research project consisting of three workshops and demonstration projects was piloted in three underserved neighborhoods to address urban heat on a local scale and collaboratively create community heat action plans. Last, a practitioner stakeholder meeting was held to discuss how the heat action plans will be integrated into other community efforts. Using data from the interviews, workshops, and stakeholder meeting, social capital was examined in the context of urban heat. Although social capital has been measured in a multitude of ways to gauge social relationships, trust, and reciprocity within a community, it is situational and reflects a position within the formal and informal aspects of any issue. Three narratives emerged from the interviews illuminating differentiated capacities to cope with urban heat: heat is an inconvenience, heat is a manageable problem, and heat is a catastrophe. For each of these narratives, generic adaptive capacity is impacted differently by specific heat adaptive capacity. The heat action plan workshops generated hyper-local heat solutions that reflected the neighborhoods’ different identities. Community-based organizations were instrumental in the success of this program. Social capital indicators were developed specific to urban heat that rely on heavily on family and personal relationships, attitudes and beliefs, perceived support, network size and community engagement. This research highlights how extreme heat vulnerability may need to be rethought to capture adaptive capacity nuances and the dynamic structure of who is vulnerable under what circumstances. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2019

In today’s complexsocio-technical systems it is not possible to foresee and prepare for allfuture events. To cope with the intricacy and coupling between people,technical systems and the dynamic environment people are required tocontinuously adapt. To design resilient systems a deepened understanding ofwhat supports and enables adaptive performance is needed. In this thesis two studiesare presented that investigate how adaptive abilities can be identified andanalysed in complex work settings across domains. The studies focus onunderstanding adaptive performance, what enables successful adaptation and how contextual factors affect the performance. The first study examines how acrisis command team adapts as they lose important functions of their teamduring a response operation.  The secondstudy presents a framework to analyse adaptive behaviour in everyday work wheresystems are working near the margins of safety. The examples that underlie theframework are based on findings from focus group discussion withrepresentatives from different organisations, including health care, nuclear,transportation and emergency services. Main contributions of this thesis includethe examination of adaptive performance and of how it can be analysed as ameans to learn about and strengthen resilience. By using contextual analysis enablersof adaptive performance and its effects the overall system are identified. Theanalysis further demonstrates that resilience is not a system property but aresult of situational circumstances and organisational structures. Theframework supports practitioners and researchers in reporting findings,structuring cases and making sense of sharp-end adaptations. The analysismethod can be used to better understand system adaptive capacities, monitoradaptive patterns and enhance current methods for safety management.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第23556号 / 地環博第213号 / 新制||地環||41(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎地球環境学専攻 / (主査)教授 星野 敏, 准教授 鬼塚 健一郎, 教授 西前 出 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

Annex 2 of the Great Lakes Water Quality Protocol calls for the collaborative development of a ‘nearshore framework’, but does not provide guidance with respect to nearshore governance. This thesis bridges this gap with a series of studies on the determinants for adaptive governance that will inform implementation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Protocol 2012. The principal focus of this work is on eutrophication, which is essentially a nearshore issue. The methodology includes a comprehensive literature review and 35 key informant interviews using a standardized questionnaire. The results assess Great Lakes governance, examine the strengths of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement Protocol 2012 and evaluate the effectiveness of the International Joint Commission. A major product of the research is the development of a framework for assessing adaptive capacity based on six determinants: public participation, science, networks, leadership, flexibility and resources. The framework is validated in the case study of eutrophication in Lake Erie and used to identify gaps in adaptive capacity for current eutrophication governance of Lake Erie. The framework was then tested on two additional case studies, the Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea Region. These systems are both eutrophic and are similar in many other ways to the Great Lakes. This allowed exploration of issues of scale, from local (Chesapeake Bay) to binational (the Great lakes) to transnational (the Baltic Sea). The most important finding of this work is that the key barrier for building adaptive capacity for eutrophication governance in the Great Lakes is the lack of adequate leadership and resources. A key recommendation is therefore that the IJC be strengthened in its role to function as a collaborative leader to foster adaptive capacity. The findings from this research can inform the implementation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Protocol 2012. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Regenerative Agriculture (RA) is increasingly promoted as a sustainable agri-food solution. Agronomic studies find that RA practices (e.g. cover crops, reduced tillage, crop rotation, and agroforestry) can regulate soil moisture, sequester atmospheric carbon, enhance biodiversity, and reduce the impacts of droughts and floods. Diverse public, private, and civil society initiatives therefore aim to increase farmer adoption of RA. However, empirical knowledge about the social processes underlying transformation to a regenerative food system is limited. Most research has focused on discourse analyses of RA and farmer experiences employing RA practices. While local institutions are recognized as potentially vital to facilitating RA transformations, there is a lack of empirical research documenting how institutions work to stimulate RA. This thesis presents a case study of Associacion AlVelAl, a grassroots RA movement based in Southeast Spain. Operating since 2015, AlVelAl has more than 500 members, most of whom are almond farmers. Employing concepts of adaptive capacity and bricolage, I examine the social innovations and institutional network that AlVelAl has built to nurture a RA transformation in the region. Specifically, I ask how does AlVelAl navigate sociocultural, ecological, and political-economic contexts at different scales to amplify the transformative potential of its social innovations? I conducted nine weeks of grounded research, involving participation at 7 events and interviews with 16 local actors who included AlVelAl employees, farmer members, and collaborators. My findings suggest that RA transformations depend on enabling farmers while also advancing systemic change. My study answers calls to identify strategies that can amplify adaptive capacity’s potential to generate transformational change. I point to four strategies that AlVelAl relies upon to translate RA practices into contextually-feasible steps for farmers and to mobilize collective action from diverse actors: 1) leveraging synergies among social innovations, 2) social mobilization through a vision for a desired future, 3) employing social-ecological relational thinking, and 4) adopting a systemic cross-scale approach.