Organising climate change adaptation

Thesis

Current efforts by nation-state governments to organise adaptation in developing countries are characterised by a broad concern with defining, measuring and governing adaptation efforts, with surprisingly little on how these efforts are organised and implemented through the different participant organisations. In this thesis, I develop an organisation-centred perspective based on the three distinct and relatively independent literatures of climate change adaptation, organisation theory and network analysis to study the emerging adaptation initiatives in developing countries. I use the term ‘organising adaptation’, to focus analytical attention on the organisational architectures and linkages that are critical, to develop coordinated responses, and to move forward from policy and plans to practical action. I present my results in four empirical papers from a detailed study of organising climate change adaptation in the agriculture sector in Ghana, supplemented with analysis from Nepal and Pakistan. I adopt a ‘granular’ and ‘nested’ design, backed by extensive empirical field data to analyse the effect and connectedness of key organisations in adaptation from local to national planning levels. The results show that the planned structures take on an organisational form composed of many component organisations (I refer to them as ‘meta-organisation’), but these structures are out of alignment with the requirements needed to address challenges posed by climate change. The component organisations in turn form implicit sub-groups (I refer to them as organisation-communities) and take on specific roles that are asymmetric and the challenges are often articulated in way that conflicts with, or thwarts, other capacity, leading to gaps in potential adaptation action. The findings of the papers emphasise that organisations and their relationships matter greatly but that it is also important to examine how these organisations work and what they do within the wider networks involved in adaptation.

Authors: Chaudhury, A

• Alternative title: An organisation and network perspective to agriculture adaptation in developing countries
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j1njgdpjg
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Pakistan; Adaptation Planning; Nepal; Organisational Theory; Adaptive Capacity; Climate Change; Social Network Analysis; Implementation; Robust Action; Adaptation; Ghana; Agriculture
• Subjects: Organizational effectiveness; Environmental Planning and Management; Climatic changes