“How the world deals with large and serious problems is almost certainly going to shape our collective future” is the second line – and a promising start – in this edited Springer volume titled “Rethinking resilience, adaptation and transformation in a time of change”. The volume is edited by Wanglin Yan and Will Galloway, both based in Japan, and many of the contributors were in Japan during the massive disaster that struct the country’s Northern coast in March 2011.
Chapter 10 discusses the development of an international institutional framework for climate adaptation and practice in adaptation planning in developing countries. That development is clearly a work in progress, and my feeling is that we all tend to move too quickly to the next best thing, without properly learning from what we have just introduced… This publication doesn’t even touch upon the Green Climate Fund (GCF), but we tend to move from one fund to the next, to the next, when these existing funds are underfunded and full of exciting proposals that need funding. This means that the governments in receiving countries – who are already spread thin – need to do yet another baseline assessment and rewrite everything to the GCF objectives after they just submitted it to the LDCF/SCCF to find out there is little money. Equally, 50+ countries completed their National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA), to find little funding for their implementation, now developed their National Adaptation Plans (NAP) – yes, with a longer time horizon, to then find out they now need to come up with Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that also touch upon adaptation… We keep ourselves very busy, but we learn little from the past.
Chapter 16 stood out, because of its focus on ‘swarm planning’, something I had heard of, but I am not familiar with. Swarm planning departs from current spatial planning practice, adjusted on the basis of complexity theory. Problems play over long timeframes and are often seen as ‘wicked’. Spatial planning practice has had difficulties incorporating these characteristics, because these planning systems are generally used to solve rather straightforward and often linear problems. Swarm planning incorporates wicked problem thinking into spatial planning, aiming to develop a plan that is adjustable if need be.
Part V Transformation from disaster and crisis. Chapters 17 to 20 focus on the opportunity for transformative changes in the aftermath of a disaster.
Part VI Building resiliency with community. The last four chapters focus on the role of communities, and on how resilient communities are organized. These chapters (especially 21 and 24) resonate with me, given I was involved in the post-Tsunami reconstruction effort with the Red Cross in Banda Aceh and North Sumatra, after the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Chapter 21 discusses a community base environmental design approach, empowering local expertise, while Chapter 24 focuses on combining architects and local expertise in emergency housing implementation. We used a similar approach on a prefab design that is sensitive to the local context when designing and implementing emergency housing in the highlands of Nias Island. There was certainly a lot of learning on the job, and I would have loved to have read these last four chapters before my engagement in that Red Cross job. Still, it worked out well.
If the length of a book review is in any way in indicator for a publication's quality, then yes, it certainly is in this case! It was a pleasure reading “Rethinking resilience, adaptation and transformation in a time of change”, and - despite its price - I highly recommend this publication to those working in post disaster recovery situations, or interested in the topics of resilience, adaptation and transformation.
This blog post was published on LinkedIn by Dennis Bours on October 24, 2018. To see the original post, click here.