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Authors: Mark Pelling
Tags: Development Studies
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(Chambers, 1989) is socially amplified when multiple individuals, households or businesses deploy similar economic strategies – selling assets or changing livelihoods – and so undermining market value. Competition can turn into collaboration with virtuous magnifier effects through the use of social capital, which can be built up and whose impact can be extended through multiple simultaneous actions. There are, however, limits even to individual and societal stocks of social capital so that continuing environmental stress or repeat shocks can lead to a cascade of failure as social and economic assets are expended. Figure 2.2 indicates a sequence of coping acts that can lead to collapse as assets are depleted in the face of unrelieved stress.
Swift (1989) argues that household collapse becomes inevitable once core social and economic assets are lost and is observed even when macro-economic conditions improve, revealing how individual vulnerability, or capacity to cope, operates with a degree of independence from structural conditions. Households, especially poor households, live with many kinds of risk as well as a desire to fulfil unmet needs and wants. So it is that households have to play off expenditures on immediate household maintenance against investment to recover lost resources or offset anticipated risk, and this can make it more difficult to replace savings or productive assets once they have been expended through coping. The potential for social capital to be undermined through ever more destructive rounds of coping links household collapse to that of collectively held assets such as social cohesion or notions of community. Commencing with a shift in investment and use from bridging to bonding capital that amplifies cultural difference and competitive group behaviour (Goodhand
et al.
, 2000), subsequent coping detracts from more fundamental aspects of local social capital through a withdrawal of investment in short-term (health) and long-term (education) social capital, and finally in fragmentation of the most basic social unit – the household. As with the economic cascade, cultural contexts will determine the order movement. For
Figure 2.2
The coping cascade: coping and erosion of household sustainability
(Source: based on Pelling, 2009)
example, child sharing is a well-developed coping mechanism in the Caribbean that need not signify approaching household collapse. Here the extended family, not the household, is the basic unit of social organisation (Pelling, 2003b). Broadly, though, as a household approaches collapse subsequent acts are more difficult to reverse.
The delicate balance between the terms coping and climate change adaptation (see Table 2.2 ), and the negotiation of the intellectual division of labour between them can be found in some early writing on adaptation. Kelly and Adger (2000) define coping capacity as the ability of a unit to respond to an occurrence of harm and to avoid its potential impacts, and adaptive capacity as the ability of a unit to gradually transform its structure, functioning or organisation to survive under hazards threatening its existence. This distinction builds on earlier work; for example, working on food security, Gore (1992, in Davies, 1993) offers a distinction based on the actor–institution relationships. Coping is the means to survive within the prevailing systems of rules; adaptation is indicated when institutions (cultural norms, laws, routine behaviour) and livelihoods change. This distinction is becoming increasingly accepted. Under this rubric an example of coping might be selling cattle during drought, with adaptation signified by migration or a change in livelihood to supplement or replace dependence on livestock. Critics of this division argue that, on the ground, the distinction between coping and adaptation in terms of the depth of consequence for actors is
Table 2.2
Distinctions between coping and
Swift (1989) argues that household collapse becomes inevitable once core social and economic assets are lost and is observed even when macro-economic conditions improve, revealing how individual vulnerability, or capacity to cope, operates with a degree of independence from structural conditions. Households, especially poor households, live with many kinds of risk as well as a desire to fulfil unmet needs and wants. So it is that households have to play off expenditures on immediate household maintenance against investment to recover lost resources or offset anticipated risk, and this can make it more difficult to replace savings or productive assets once they have been expended through coping. The potential for social capital to be undermined through ever more destructive rounds of coping links household collapse to that of collectively held assets such as social cohesion or notions of community. Commencing with a shift in investment and use from bridging to bonding capital that amplifies cultural difference and competitive group behaviour (Goodhand
et al.
, 2000), subsequent coping detracts from more fundamental aspects of local social capital through a withdrawal of investment in short-term (health) and long-term (education) social capital, and finally in fragmentation of the most basic social unit – the household. As with the economic cascade, cultural contexts will determine the order movement. For
Figure 2.2
The coping cascade: coping and erosion of household sustainability
(Source: based on Pelling, 2009)
example, child sharing is a well-developed coping mechanism in the Caribbean that need not signify approaching household collapse. Here the extended family, not the household, is the basic unit of social organisation (Pelling, 2003b). Broadly, though, as a household approaches collapse subsequent acts are more difficult to reverse.
The delicate balance between the terms coping and climate change adaptation (see Table 2.2 ), and the negotiation of the intellectual division of labour between them can be found in some early writing on adaptation. Kelly and Adger (2000) define coping capacity as the ability of a unit to respond to an occurrence of harm and to avoid its potential impacts, and adaptive capacity as the ability of a unit to gradually transform its structure, functioning or organisation to survive under hazards threatening its existence. This distinction builds on earlier work; for example, working on food security, Gore (1992, in Davies, 1993) offers a distinction based on the actor–institution relationships. Coping is the means to survive within the prevailing systems of rules; adaptation is indicated when institutions (cultural norms, laws, routine behaviour) and livelihoods change. This distinction is becoming increasingly accepted. Under this rubric an example of coping might be selling cattle during drought, with adaptation signified by migration or a change in livelihood to supplement or replace dependence on livestock. Critics of this division argue that, on the ground, the distinction between coping and adaptation in terms of the depth of consequence for actors is
Table 2.2
Distinctions between coping and
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