Adaptive Governance and Climate Change

In An Inconvenient Truth, an award-winning documentary film, Al Gore used startling graphs and dramatic photos to summarize the scientific consensus on global warming and its past and projected impacts on planet Earth and its inhabitants. Along with human population growth and more powerful technologies, he cited “our way of thinking” as a third major factor that has transformed humanity’s relationship to the earth. Supporting our way of thinking are certain misconceptions the former vice president of the United States attributed to special interests. For example, he reported a leaked internal memo that advised lobbyists and public relations specialists for a group of companies including ExxonMobil to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.” And they succeeded to the extent that 53% of the 623 news stories in a random sample from influential newspapers did raise doubts about global warming. But in the end, Gore’s message about meeting this planetary emergency, as he called it, was upbeat in view of the array of technologies available to curb global warming and its impacts: “We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We’ve got to do a lot of things, not just one.” But he concluded with an important qualification: “We have everything we need, save perhaps political will.”¹

This chapter documents scientific management, and exceptions to it, in the evolution of the established climate change regime. We focus on major science programs in the first section, and then turn to decisions on climate change policy and decision making in the second. We sketched the historical context of these initiatives in the scientific management tradition in Chapter 1. The details filled in here illustrate considerable investments of time, expertise, effort, and funds consistent with the ideal type of scientific management (Box 1.1) during the last two decades. These details should not obscure the disappointing outcomes documented in the previous chapter: All programs taken together, including those not selected here, have made little difference in advancing the common interest given the magnitude of the task ahead. In the third section we consider exceptions to scientific management, including case studies of adaptation to extreme weather events and mitigation of climate change on the ground. These exceptions suggest possibilities for opening the established regime to adaptive governance. They also represent bodies of experience available for adaptation to reduce near-term and longer-term losses from climate change.

This chapter tells the story of Barrow, AK, as a microcosm of things to come at lower latitudes, as signs of climate change become ever more obvious there. The primary purpose is to harvest a body of experience on climate change adaptations for decision makers elsewhere. In the process we also illustrate intensive inquiry as proposed in Box 1.1, inquiry centered on a single case considered comprehensively and integratively. This brings into the picture important details on the ground that must be omitted in the extensive analysis characteristic of scientific management. In the first section we review adaptations in the long history of Barrow and the North Slope from the earliest settlers to the eve of rapid modernization in the region. This culminates with the story of the great storm of October 3, 1963, the most damaging on record and in living memory in Barrow, and the most influential baseline for policy planning there. In the second section we review Barrow’s vulnerability to big storms based on trends in human and natural factors, and show how those factors came together in extreme events that caused damage in Barrow. The third and final section focuses on various policy responses to these extreme events in Barrow over the last several decades, highlighting both scientific management and adaptive governance. The latter includes initial steps toward organizing a network of Alaskan Native villages to exchange policy-relevant information and influence federal policy from the bottom up.¹

This chapter elaborates the proposals in Box 1.1 for opening the climate change regime to adaptive governance. For that purpose we pull together the historical case materials in previous chapters and relevant theoretical material. Recall that Chapter 2 reviewed the evolution of scientific management in the climate change regime and exceptions that point toward adaptive governance. Chapter 3 reviewed Barrow as a microcosm of things to come as signs of climate change become more obvious at lower latitudes, including steps toward adaptive governance. Beyond these historical case materials, however, various aspects of the proposals for adaptive governance have been accepted or recommended in general literature on climate change, environmental hazards, and related policies, and in more theoretical literature on science, policy, and decision making. These convergent sources from different and larger bodies of experience add support to the proposals for adaptive governance in climate change. In particular, these convergent sources document a latent but coherent frame of reference in which the case materials become more than mere historical curiosities. They become foundations for an alternative frame to understand and reduce net losses from climate change. The established frame in the climate change regime is not the only construction of the relevant past and possible futures.

In previous chapters, we have presented the main empirical and theoretical reasons behind the proposals for adaptive governance introduced in Box 1.1. The proposals outline one approach to opening the established climate change regime, to help advance the common interests of the world’s many diverse communities. It should be reemphasized that opening the regime does not mean replacing it. In this concluding chapter, we promote careful consideration of the proposals in the continuing evolution of the climate change regime, recognizing that they will be controversial in some quarters but not in others. Careful consideration begins with an introduction to issue expansion and contraction in climate change politics. Issue expansion promotes the aspirations of scientific management, while issue contraction serves to defend them against adaptive governance.¹