| 英文摘要: | To the Editor —
Although the recent Perspective by Eisenack et. al.1 attempts to move the discussion on barriers to climate change adaptation forwards, in our view it still does not address a key challenge that has hampered this line of research since its beginnings. In 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC stated that adaptation efforts will encounter — and hence need to overcome — different types of limits, constraints or barriers2. Since then, the scientific community has busily identified and catalogued all manner of different barriers, and discussed various means of overcoming them. While offering an important first step in exploring adaptation, the tendency to abide by top-down and functionalist views of decision-making and barriers is both problematic conceptually and unsupportable empirically if the ambition is to explain adaptation decision-making.
Much of the scholarly debate has implicitly followed the logic that since there is a 'gap' between the actual and expected output of adaptation decision-making, something must be preventing policymaking from attaining its true equilibrium. Hence the often ex ante identified barriers to adaptation required to explain this gap1. The key problem with this line of thinking is that it originates with the normative assumption that collective decision-making at national, regional, and local levels should be producing climate-adaptive decisions and actions. This highly linear and functionalist understanding of decision-making assumes that socio-political systems would be automatically adjusting to changes in the absence of barriers3. As a consequence of such a view, the complexities of collective decision-making on adaptation are reduced to simple input–output models in which important internal dynamics and processes are absent. This is what has often been referred to as a black box view on decision-making4.
Categorizing any factor or process as a barrier reduces complex and highly dynamic decision-making processes into simplified, static and metaphorical statements about why current outcomes are 'incorrect'. Examples are omnipresent in the adaptation literature, in which blame for the failure of decision-making to address climate change risks is placed on such factors as lack of resources, lack of knowledge, or lack of will5. But explaining decision-making requires first and foremost identification of the suite of (plausible) causal processes that are responsible for producing a certain outcome or effect6. Barrier thinking, with its overly reductionist comprehension of the decision-making process, prevents such explanations.
Contemporary public policy and governance studies have long abandoned barrier thinking and instead treat decision-making processes as dynamically complex, contributing to an erratic pattern of decision-making that does not necessarily result in appropriate responses to policy drivers7, 8. Of central concern are the iterative processes of social construction, problem framing and the intentional development of policy alternatives. Processes such as power struggles, misfortune, organized irresponsibility and social learning — as well as policy innovation and diffusion — are critical to policy outcomes4, 5, 9, and thus also to our research frameworks, if they are to be realistic and robust.
Although we sympathize with the proposal by Eisenack et al.1 to include feedback, causal interdependencies and agency — in other words to increase complexity — in climate change adaptation policy analysis, these proposals are of limited value if they remain rooted in barrier thinking. If the ambition is to explain rather than to describe how public policy can successfully address the challenges of climate change adaptation, the functionalist framework — and the associated concept of barriers — should be discarded altogether.
Alternatives are plentiful. In political sciences, for example, implementation research has moved away from notions of barriers to implementation as it became clear that the actions prescribed based on the identified barriers fail to solve the problems in practice. Contemporary third generation implementation studies now focus on a variety of top-down and bottom-up causes and processes for explaining the way decision-makers deal with given rules and norms in understanding how implementation processes work, and succeed or fail10. In this respect, Michael Lipsky's seminal study is worth mentioning, as he shows how street level bureaucrats reinterpret policy guidelines to deliver actions that fit their beliefs and sense of justice11.
Recent research on adaptation starts to offer possible alternative routes to policy analysis that explore deeper causal processes at work. For example, Dowd et al.12 used social network theory and showed that earlier and more transitional adapters were less likely to have close ties with family and community, and more likely to have external network ties, than their counterparts. Similarly, Cashore and Wejs13, adopting a legitimacy perspective on policy-making, explored the regulative, normative and cultural institutional dimensions of constructing legitimacy through the climate secretariat in Aarhus, Denmark, and the effect that different forms of legitimacy had on resulting adaptation planning. Their analysis provides detailed insights that allow for concrete interventions in practice, for example, when regulatory elements are needed to build legitimacy. These studies are informed by current work in the social sciences and are conceptually nuanced and empirically grounded.
Our Correspondence is not merely an expression of academic or methodological concern: A mismatch between academic models and the practical realities in which practitioners operate translates into poorly informed future policy prescriptions. Almost ten years of barrier thinking and analysis have yielded very limited advice about how to intervene in practice to secure better outcomes14, 15. The examples mentioned above provide detailed explanations of the decision dynamics and causal processes that go into climate change policy-making and practice, and therefore are far more useful to practitioners and academics than functionalist approaches to adaptation. By opening up the black box of decision-making a whole range of more tailored interventions become available to address the challenges of adaptation in practice. Hence we argue that the biggest 'barrier' to adaptation might very well be the concept of barriers itself and how it is currently being used in studying adaptation decision-making. |