Social contracts for adaptation to climate change

Doshi, Deepal (2024): Social contracts for adaptation to climate change: conceptual contributions, methodological innovations, and empirical insights from flood risk management in Mumbai. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Geowissenschaften

Abstract

Adaptation to the impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly urgent and challenging. Meeting the stark challenges of adaptation will require collective efforts from different actors of society (state, civil society, individuals, private sector, etc.), ideally with a shared understanding of adaptation goals and visions and a clear, agreed-upon distribution of roles and responsibilities. However, in reality, adaptation often occurs in a socially contested arena, characterized by multi-actor constellations with potentially diverging viewpoints on what different actors envision and expect in terms of adaptation priorities and the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation. An urgent requirement to advance adaptation efforts is the need for coherent social contracts where actors ideally agree or find an arrangement, despite conflicting perspectives. Despite the growing scientific research on adaptation, several gaps could be observed in the conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and methodological debates on understanding and assessing social contracts for adaptation in the current literature. Although previous literature has established the potential usefulness of a social contracts lens to adaptation debates, detailed conceptual and theoretical understanding in the adaptation context is largely lacking to date. Further, empirical evidence and conceptual literature on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and perceived distributions of roles and responsibilities have received some attention yet remain under-researched and often without an explicit social contracts lens. Given such perspectives' tacit and implicit nature, a related methodological challenge is the difficulty in capturing actors’ diverse viewpoints. A significant step toward achieving coherent social contracts for adaptation is understanding how different actors perceive and evaluate their solution spaces for adaptation in a multi-dimensional fashion, which has not received sufficient attention in the literature. The above-identified gaps are most starkly illustrated in cities and urban areas, especially in countries with emerging markets, that are situated at the confluence of being on the frontlines of climate risk globally, faced with high adaptation pressure, changing patterns of social, economic, and demographic growth but at the same time also seen as frontrunners and role models of countries and regions. Mumbai, the financial capital of India, ranks among the top cities at risk of coastal flooding and the impact of rising sea levels in current and future rankings. The city is characterized by some of the heaviest adaptation challenges that one can find globally, along with stark inequalities, with almost half the population living in slums on the one end and a powerful elite on the other, with a growing aspirational middle class in between. Hence, the study draws on flood risk management in Mumbai, considered a highly relevant and important empirical case. The study presented here aims to address the above-identified research gaps and adopts a three-fold objective. First, it seeks to advance the conceptual understanding of social contracts for adaptation by providing a framework to guide their assessment. Second, it aims to empirically assess how different actors perceive and evaluate adaptation solution spaces for their desirability and feasibility in a multi-dimensional fashion. Further, the study assesses actors’ desired adaptation objectives and expectations on the distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation to flood risk in Mumbai. Finally, in methodological terms, it aims to explore the potential of using social listening on Twitter to assess social contracts for adaptation in cities and other societal contexts. Against this background, the study adopts a mixed methods approach and combines inductive exploration of the data with the deductive application of a social contracts theoretical lens. The study develops the approach of social listening using Twitter data to capture actors’ diverse viewpoints on adaptation priorities and expectations of roles and responsibilities for flood risk management in Mumbai, given that social media platforms are becoming increasingly important arenas of exchange. This involved collecting all flood-risk-related Tweets over four months of the monsoon season 2021 (ca. 70,000 Tweets), which were subsequently filtered for their dominance and analyzed. These findings are triangulated with semi-structured expert interviews conducted with key stakeholders across the state, civil society, and academic actors from Mumbai and field-based participant observation at workshops and meetings. The initially planned household survey had to be postponed due to the pandemic that heavily influenced the research design of this study. Guided by the conceptual lens of social contracts and the mixed-methods approach, the study draws on the empirical analysis of flood risk management in Mumbai. The findings from the multi-dimensional evaluation of perceived solution spaces for adaptation revealed significant mismatches between state and non-state actors’ perceptions of desirability and the evaluation of the feasibility of different adaptation options. Overall, institutional changes and the pivotal role of institutional dimensions were most strongly identified, especially by non-state actors. At the same time, the starkest disparities were found between state and non-state actors on physical infrastructure measures. In operationalizing the conceptual framework of social contracts for adaptation, the study found surprisingly wide gaps and large contestations in the adaptation debates in Mumbai in two respects: between different actors and between what actors envisioned, observed in reality, and perceived as legally defined. Diverging viewpoints on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and target actors could be observed as well as strong rifts in the distribution of roles and responsibilities. In addition to the diverging perspectives, the findings also showed ambiguity in both regards, where actors did not clearly articulate their views. Social listening on Twitter allowed to capture actors' unsolicited, implicit, and tacit viewpoints in a large N sample in almost real-time. Further, the qualitative sentiment analysis proved to be a helpful entry point for understanding the gaps between actors’ viewpoints and expectations. The study could make an empirical and analytical contribution to advance current feasibility assessments of adaptation options by including an actor-specific lens, distinguishing desirability from feasibility, and applying it to real-world settings. An explicit focus on actors’ desired adaptation objectives and target actors and the contestations revealed through the empirical findings emphasize the importance of assessing and aligning actors’ underlying priorities in negotiating the process of forming coherent social contracts for adaptation. The findings suggest aligning actors’ desired adaptation objectives as a first step toward shaping coherent social contracts for adaptation. Rifts and ambiguities in actors’ perceptions of who is or should be responsible for what tasks in adapting ultimately have severe implications on the distribution of burdens. These questions become critical when existing risk management regimes start to approach their limits not only in light of the changing feasibility or effectiveness of adaptation options but also in the face of evolving priorities in rapidly growing economies and aspirational societies such as India. The study's most novel contribution lies in its methodological development of social listening on Twitter to assess gaps in social contracts for adaptation. The study could contribute to the conceptual, empirical, and methodological realms of scientific knowledge on social contracts for adaptation and propose several questions for future research.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik ; 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 550 Geowissenschaften
• Fakultäten: Fakultät für Geowissenschaften
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 30. Oktober 2024
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Garschagen, Matthias