Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation, by Mark Pelling (2011, Routledge).
This book challenges contemporary approaches to adaptation. Pelling highlights the importance of adaptation as transformation. He argues that as adaptation discourses begin to emerge worldwide, they can either challenge or further entrench development inequalities and failures. The book shows that it is not enough to adapt to the consequences of climate change; the root causes of vulnerability must addressed, including approaches to development and the underlying factors that contribute to climate change. In reading this book, one realizes that accommodating risk is itself a risky approach to adaptation. Pelling makes it clear that the biggest adaptation that society can make is to transform the systems and structures that are contributing to climate change vulnerability in the first place.
“… perhaps the most profound act of transformation facing humanity as it comes to live with climate change requires a cultural shift from seeing adaptation as managing the environment ‘out there’ to learning how to reorgnize social and socio-ecological relationships, procedures and underlying values ‘in here’.” (Pelling 2011, p. 88)