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Lennart Olsson, LUCSUS

Lennart Olsson

Professor, Docent

Lennart Olsson, LUCSUS

Adaptation and the poor: development, resilience and transition

Author

  • Anne Jerneck
  • Lennart Olsson

Summary, in English

Risk minimization is no longer a sufficient survival strategy for poor people in livelihood systems increasingly exposed to frequent extreme events. This calls for comprehensive adaptation to climate change. Within the climate change regime, adaptation is as central as mitigation but needs to be much more explicitly addressed at local, national and global levels. There is also a need for policy renewal in other international regimes that are central to adaptation, such as environment, human rights, development and trade. Accordingly, this article addresses poverty-relevant adaptation through the medium of three discourses: development, resilience, and transition theory. Development, as a post-war project of theories, strategies and policies, spells out the links between rich and poor countries and offers modernization trajectories but few solutions for adaptation and sustainability transitions. Resilience, as an analytical framework emerging in ecology in the 1970s in reaction to ideas of equilibrium, depicts incremental changes and capacity to preserve systems within given frames but does not recognize that social change mainly implies transitions to renewed forms of production, consumption and distribution with new combinations of organization, institutions and technology. Transition theory focuses on profound multilevel changes in complex (sub)systems, thereby offering a powerful framework for theorizing empirical findings and promoting adaptation as a transition to sustainability.

Department/s

  • Department of Economic History
  • LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)

Publishing year

2008

Language

English

Pages

170-182

Publication/Series

Climate Policy

Volume

8

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
  • Economic History

Keywords

  • adaptation
  • development
  • insurance
  • poverty
  • alleviation
  • transition theory
  • resilience
  • climate change

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1469-3062