Abstract
Climate change adaptation is increasingly concerned with how organisations develop capacity to adapt to uncertain futures. A participatory action research project conducted in Victoria, Australia, examined how health and social service organisations developed their organisational adaptive capacity through the use of adaptation decision-support tools. It can be challenging for any organisation to select and apply a decision-support tool, but this is particularly the case where resources and capacities are limited. For most organisations, climate change is only one of a complex set of dynamic stressors they must consider in meeting organisational goals. This paper shows that while decision-support tools can help co-generate knowledge and facilitate customised organisational adaptation processes, for them to be practically helpful for organisations with limited resources and capacities, intensive collaborative and discursive processes are needed to adjust such tools to fit specific organisational contexts and needs. Facilitators and participatory approaches that enable co-inquiry can play a critical role in supplementing scarce resources and initiating adaptation processes that go well beyond the scope and purpose of the decision-support tool used. Organisations working effectively with decision-support tools to adapt to climate change will need to feel ownership of them and have confidence in modifying them to suit their particular adaptation needs and organisational goals.
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Notes
Referred to as ‘adaptation tools’ in the following for brevity reasons.
The description of the picture guided the semi-structured interview, which was framed by five main questions (see Supplementary Material).
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Acknowledgments
We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the other members of the research team: Alianne MacArthur, Sophie Turner, Philip Wallis. Furthermore, we are indebted to Daniel Voronoff, Thomas Mitchell, John Houlihan, Ian Mansergh, and Rod Keenan, for their inputs into the project, the participating organisations named in the paper, as well as the detailed, constructive feedback provided by the Guest Editor and three anonymous reviewers.
Funding
The research received funding from the Victorian Government (Australia) through the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (VCCCAR).
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The authors would like to dedicate this article to our colleague and former team member Philip Wallis✝, who greatly contributed to this work.
This article is part of a Special Issue on ‘Decision Support Tools for Climate Change Adaptation’ edited by Jean Palutikof, Roger Street, and Edward Gardiner.
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Fünfgeld, H., Lonsdale, K. & Bosomworth, K. Beyond the tools: supporting adaptation when organisational resources and capacities are in short supply. Climatic Change 153, 625–641 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2238-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2238-7