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Regional Studies

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The ‘resilience trap’: exploring the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions

Andrew P. Kythreotis & Gillian I. Bristow

To cite this article: Andrew P. Kythreotis & Gillian I. Bristow (2017) The ‘resilience trap’: exploring the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions, Regional Studies, 51:10, 1530-1541, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2016.1200719

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1200719

Published online: 27 Jul 2016.

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The ‘resilience trap’: exploring the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions Andrew P. Kythreotisa and Gillian I. Bristowb

ABSTRACT The ‘resilience trap’: exploring the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions. Regional Studies. This paper examines how adaptation is interpreted across different UK city-regions by governance and policy actors, finding that the discourse of adaptation is giving way to resilience. This is explained by the value of resilience as a discursive construct in mobilizing and coordinating policy actions. Resilience has greater appeal as a framing device over adaptation to such actors given its potential to enable buy-in from a wider city-regional governance network. However, this paper also highlights the ‘resilience trap’: the dangers of adopting short-term strategies, re-badging existing strategies and widening governance networks that obfuscate sub-national mobilization around adaptation. It then reflects on how governance actors may act to avoid the resilience trap.

KEYWORDS adaptation; resilience; policy discourse; climate governance; sub-national scale; city-region

摘要

‘回復力陷阱’：探讨英国城市区域调适气候变迁的回復力之实质效用，区域研究。本文检视不同英国城市区域中的治

理与政策行动者如何诠释调适力，并发现调适力的论述，正逐渐被回復力取代。此般现象，将透过回復力的价值作为

动员并协调政策行动的论述建构进行解释。对上述行动者而言，回復力作为框架的机制，较调适力更具吸引力，因其

具有让更广阔的城市区域治理网络接受的潜能。但本文同时强调’回復力的陷阱’：亦即採取短期策略、重新授予既有

的策略，以及扩大混淆次国家层级的调适力动员之治理网络。本文接着反思治理行动者如何行动以避免回復力陷阱。

调适力

回復力; 政策论述; 气候治理; 次国家尺度; 城市区域

RÉSUMÉ Le ‘piège de la résilience’: examiner l’utilité pratique de la résilience quant à l’adaptation au changement climatique des villes-régions situées au R-U. Regional Studies. Cet article examine comment l’adaptation est interprétée par les responsables de la gouvernance et de la politique à travers diverses villes-régions situées au R-U. Il s’avere que le discours relatif à l’adaptation cède la place à celui à propos de la résilience. Cela s’explique par la valeur de la résilience en tant qu’un concept discursif pour mobiliser et coordonner les mesures politiques. Pour de tels responsables, la résilience l’emporte sur l’adaptation comme dispositif d’encadrement étant donné son potentiel de faciliter l’assentiment à partir d’un réseau de gouvernance plus large de villes-régions. Cependant, cet article souligne aussi le ‘piège de la résilience’: à savoir, les dangers que présentent l’adoption des stratégies à court terme, le rééquitage des politiques en vigueur et l’élargissement des réseaux de gouvernance qui obscurcissent au niveau sous-national la mobilisation autour de l’adaptation. Dans un deuxième temps, l’article considère comment les responsables de la gouvernance pourraient agir pour éviter le piège de la résilience.

MOTS-CLÉS adaptation; résilience; discours politique; gouvernance du climat; échelle sous-nationale; ville-région

© 2016 Regional Studies Association

CONTACT a(Corresponding author) [email protected] Cardiff School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Zuckerman Institute for Connective Environmental Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. b [email protected] Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.

REGIONAL STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 51, NO. 10, 1530–1541 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1200719

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die ‘Resilienz-Falle’: Untersuchung des praktischen Nutzens der Resilienz für die Anpassung von britischen Stadtregionen an den Klimawandel. Regional Studies. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir, wie Anpassung in verschiedenen britischen Stadtregionen je nach Regierungsführung und politischen Akteuren interpretiert wird, wobei wir feststellen, dass der Diskurs der Anpassung dem der Resilienz weicht. Die Erklärung hierfür liegt im Wert der Resilienz als diskursivem Konstrukt zur Mobilisierung und Koordinierung politischer Maßnahmen. Resilienz hat für diese Akteure im Vergleich zur Anpassung als Rahmung einen größeren Anreiz, da sie das Potenzial zur Einbeziehung eines breiteren Netzwerks der stadtregionalen Regierungsführung bietet. Gleichzeitig wird in diesem Artikel aber auch die ‘Resilienz-Falle’ verdeutlicht: die Gefahren der Verfolgung von kurzfristigen Strategien, der Umbenennung vorhandener Strategien und der Erweiterung der Regierungsführungs-Netzwerke, die die subnationale Mobilisierung im Bereich der Anpassung verschleiern. Anschließend stellen wir Überlegungen an, wie die Akteure der Regierungsführung die Resilienz-Falle vermeiden können.

SCHLÜSSELWÖRTER Anpassung; Resilienz; politischer Diskurs; Klima-Regierungsführung; subnationale Ebene; Stadtregion

RESUMEN La ‘trampa de la resiliencia’: análisis de la utilidad práctica de la resiliencia para la adaptación al cambio climático en las regiones metropolitanas del Reino Unido. Regional Studies. En este artículo analizamos de qué forma interpretan los actores gubernamentales y políticos la adaptación en las diferentes regiones metropolitanas británicas y observamos que el discurso de adaptación da paso a la resiliencia. Esto se explica por el valor de la resiliencia como construcción discursiva a la hora de movilizar y coordinar las medidas políticas. Para estos actores, la resiliencia tiene mayor atracción como enmarcación que la adaptación porque tiene la posibilidad de permitir la integración de una red más amplia de gobernanza regional metropolitana. Sin embargo, también ponemos de relieve la ‘trampa de la resiliencia’: los peligros de adoptar estrategias a corto plazo, cambiar la denominación de las estrategias existentes y ampliar las redes de gobernanza que eclipsan la movilización subnacional en torno a la adaptación. Finalmente reflexionamos sobre cómo pueden actuar los actores gubernamentales para evitar la trampa de la resiliencia.

PALABRAS CLAVES adaptación; resiliencia; discurso político; gobernanza climática; escala subnacional; región metropolitana

JEL Q54, Q58 HISTORY Received 20 July 2015; in revised form 6 June 2016

INTRODUCTION

The scientific evidence for human-induced climate change suggests that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate and that this warming is already having an impact on physical and human systems (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2014a, p. 1132; Rosenzweig et al., 2008). Governments and policy-makers have pro- moted two main strategies to combat this. Firstly, mitiga- tion, which reduces the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming (IPCC, 2014b); and secondly, adaptation, which adjusts physical and human sys- tems to cope with the effects of such warming (IPCC, 2014c, p. 151; Smit & Wandel, 2006). Successful adap- tation is increasingly recognized as being dependent upon locally distinct risk-management approaches through ‘col- lective’ governance rather than top-down government action (Nieuwaal, Driessen, Spit, & Termeer, 2009). This reflects the limitations of scientific data and modelling in predicting climate impacts at the sub-national scale (Demeritt, 2006).

As such, sub-national actors, including regional and local governments, are increasingly regarded as having a key role to play in both delivering adaptation strategies and coordinating bottom-up governance action that work

across multiple political scales (Adger, Arnell, & Tomp- kins, 2005; Baker, Peterson, Brown, & McAlpine, 2012; Berrang-Ford, Ford, & Paterson, 2011; Bulkeley & Betsill, 2013; Jones, 2011). This also reflects a recognition that the inevitable surprises of climate change are likely to unfold on a regional and local scale where adaptive response becomes central (Holling, 1996). In the UK, adaptation has evolved through key legislation such as the 2008 Climate Change Act, and resultant policy initiatives including the UK Cli- mate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA), the National Adaptation Programme (NAP) and the National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF) (for more UK adaptation policy description, see Porter, Demeritt, & Dessai, 2015). However, whilst NAPs are a statutory requirement in devolved regions, it is not statutory for all local authorities to report on adaptation actions; organizations that con- ducted the 2012 CCRA did so on a voluntary basis. This has led to the NAP in the UK being criticized for lacking coordination, stakeholder involvement and having unclear divisions of responsibilities (Biesbroek et al., 2010). Fur- thermore, given its non-statutory status, it has been reported that funding for adaptation remains piecemeal (Asenova, Bailey, & McCann, 2015; Porter et al., 2015) and will continue to be so in future (Ward, 2015).

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Indeed, there has been limited evidence to date that cli- mate change adaptation is in fact trickling down appropri- ately to local government levels (Tompkins et al., 2010), let alone becoming a more collective governance issue at the sub-national scale. One potential reason for this is that policy-makers can interpret adaptation in often quite different ways (Levina & Tirpak, 2006, p. 25). This may reflect how key socio-institutional processes of human behaviour, decision-making and agency, in particular socio-spatial contexts, create differences in the evaluation and knowledge of specific risks (McDaniels, Chang, Cole, Mikawoz, & Longstaff, 2008), and the skills and willingness to embrace change (Adger et al., 2005; Kythreotis, Mercer, & Frostick, 2013).

In this regard, the rising prominence of the concept of resilience in the context of climate adaptation raises inter- esting questions. The socio-ecological notion of resilience, defined as the ability of human communities to withstand external shocks and to recover (Adger, 2000), is developing greater traction in the policy discourse and practice around climate change at all spatial scales including the sub- national scale (Shaw & Theobald, 2011). Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in both academic and policy discourses, particularly around climate change and environmental management, where it is devel- oping widespread appeal. It is a concept that has multiple disciplinary origins but which is commonly understood to entail both robustness and strength (i.e., the ability to with- stand a shock), and the rapidity and flexibility of response (or ability to recover quickly from a shock). In relation to climate change, resilience can be regarded as being consti- tutive of both mitigation and adaptation activities: mitiga- tion can increase the robustness of the system, whilst adaptation can increase the rapidity of recovery (McDaniels et al., 2008). Resilience is, however, increasingly acknowl- edged to be a ‘fuzzy’ concept open to multiple interpret- ations in policy contexts (e.g., White & O’Hare, 2014). This raises interesting questions as to the status and interpretation of resilience in sub-national climate change governance, particularly given the potential significance and value of fuzzy concepts in galvanizing action and debate (Lagendijk, 2003; Markusen, 1999).

The purpose of this paper is thus to explore how resili- ence and adaptation are defined by policy and governance stakeholders dealing with climate change in selected UK city-regions. In particular, this paper interrogates the meaning and relevance of adaptation and resilience in pol- icy discourse, and explores what factors are influencing their relative discursive appeal. In the broad context of resi- lience, it focuses on adaptation rather than mitigation given the increasing emphasis upon adaptation at the sub- national scale.

The paper is organized as follows. The next section defines adaptation, mitigation and resilience and draws upon literatures on discourse formation and change to pro- vide insights into why certain ideas and concepts rise to prominence in policy discourse. Using empirical data derived from interviews in selected UK city-regions, the third section illustrates and seeks to explain the growing

appeal of resilience in climate change discourse and practice at the sub-national scale in the UK. The fourth section explores some of the potentially dangerous consequences of this shift which is referred to here as the ‘resilience trap’. This paper points to some of the potential dangers in the prioritization of a discourse which is associated with a focus on short-term responses to extreme weather events rather than longer-term adaptation. The paper con- cludes by reflecting upon how governance actors may act to avoid the dangers of the resilience trap.

THE DISCOURSES OF ADAPTATION AND RESILIENCE

There is a strong literature seeking to conceptualize the meanings of adaptation, mitigation and resilience in relation to climate change and environmental management. Mitigation definitions are broadly based upon lowering anthropogenic GHG emissions. More specifically, mitiga- tion has been defined as ‘the effort to control the human sources of climate change and their cumulative impacts, notably the emission of greenhouse gases’ (IPCC, 2014b, p. 114). Mitigation (alongside adaptation) has been linked to academic work on resilience, particularly resilient cities and urban areas (Leichenko, 2011; Revi, 2008). Further- more, policy-neutral advice from the IPCC advises that limiting GHGmitigation actions by governments can hin- der climate-resilient pathways (IPCC, 2014c, pp. 1112– 1115). Whilst this paper acknowledges the contribution of mitigation to engendering more effective urban resili- ence, it focuses on adaptation and resilience given the pro- minence afforded to adaptation policy at the sub-national scale. Whilst definitions of adaptation vary, they generally coalesce around adjustments that reduce society’s vulner- ability to climate shocks and change (Smit & Wandel, 2006). Sub-national governments are well placed to pro- mote adaptation policies that reduce climate vulnerability and increase the resilience of communities to climate impacts (Mazmanian, Jurewitz, & Nelson, 2013), owing to their greater flexibility of response to climate shocks and their potential to be more innovative than national and international policy-makers (Puppim De Oliveira, 2009).

Resilience is also subject to varying definitions owing to its wide disciplinary basis. A broad distinction can be made between two different conceptions of the term (Pendall, Foster, & Cowell, 2010). The first is based on the engin- eering conception of resilience that focuses on the resist- ance of a system to shocks and the speed of its return or ‘bounce-back’ to a pre-shock state or equilibrium. The fas- ter the system returns to equilibrium, the more resilient it is. The second is based on an ecological conception of resi- lience that embraces a system’s ability to withstand or absorb changes of state variables (Holling, 1961, 1973; Rosenzweig, 1971) as well as its capacity to respond and recover quickly from a shock and thus to return to an equi- librium state after a temporary disturbance.

Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in both academic and policy discourses, particularly

1532 Andrew P. Kythreotis and Gillian I. Bristow

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around climate change and environmental management, where it is developing widespread appeal. Holling’s eco- logical conception of resilience (Holling, 1996) is widely referred to in understanding resilience as an adaptive man- agement process and has been critical in helping translate resilience thinking from the ecological world to complex human/social systems (Davoudi & Porter, 2012). The use of complexity theory has since been applied to develop- ing an understanding of how social–ecological systems can become more resilient in the context of emerging ‘wicked’ issues such as the vulnerabilities and adaptations of people and places associated with climate change (Engle, 2011; Gallopín, 2006; Nelson, Adger, & Brown, 2007; Vogel, 2006; Vogel, Moser, Kasperson, & Dabelko, 2007; Young, 2010). In relation to climate change, resilience is commonly understood to embrace both the capacity to withstand the disruptive effects of climate change and the speed and flexibility of response and recovery. As such, resi- lience can be regarded as being constitutive of both mitiga- tion and adaptation activities: mitigation can increase the robustness of the system, whilst adaptation can increase the rapidity of recovery (McDaniels et al., 2008).

From its basis as a descriptive ecological term, resilience has been frequently redefined and extended by heuristic, metaphorical or normative dimensions (Brand & Jax, 2007). The appeal of resilience amongst policy actors car- ries some dangers, however. Resilience is acknowledged to be a ‘fuzzy’ concept that becomes increasingly vague and woolly when it travels from being a descriptive ecologi- cal concept to become a feature of policy discourse (Olsson, Jerneck, Thoren, Persson, & O’Byrne, 2015; Welsh, 2014; White & O’Hare, 2014). Resilience in policy statements thus often blends descriptive and normative dimensions and is conceived very broadly as an approach to adaptive governance or as a metaphor for the flexibility of a social– ecological system over the long-term (Brand & Jax, 2007). This raises interesting questions as to why resilience has gained traction amongst climate change policy-makers and what, if any, are the consequences of its fuzziness of meaning in practice.

Discursive and interpretive approaches to understanding policy provide an interesting perspective from which to understand how and why certain descriptive concepts travel into policy language and communication and become salient (e.g., Hajer, 1995; Howarth, 2005). Critical discourse analy- sis focuses upon examining policy-makers’ views, interpret- ations and communications to explore how language is used, concepts defined and narratives for action created. Discourse is defined as being derived from and dependent upon a range of social practices and norms that work together. This draws attention to how discourses are formed and shaped and to the possibility of contrasting sets of influences working to provide divergent discourses, or particular dis- courses rising to prominence (Howarth, 2005). It recognizes that policy discourses are ultimately shaped by social inter- actions and interests as much as by ideas and a rational or structured approach to policy-making.

The value of critical discourse analysis in the context of climate change policy lies in its ability to both provoke

interrogation of the utility of certain concepts for advancing particular policy goals, and in its alignment with the recog- nition that physical–material phenomena such as climate change resilience may have culturally based social attribu- tions of meaning given to them (Christmann, Balgar, & Mahlkow, 2014). Adger (2000) asks whether ecological understandings of resilience actually resonate or can be linked with social interpretations of resilience within insti- tutions. The literature acknowledges a tendency to reify the physical aspects of climate change (e.g., scientific models of future climate) to support policy, rather than our social and cultural understandings (Aspinall, 2010; Demeritt, 2006; Hulme, 2011; Jasanoff, 2010; Palsson et al., 2013; Yearley, 2009). The understanding of climate change science and policy solely around predictive narratives of physical sciences is problematic, however, if, as suggested by Duit, Galaz, Eckerberg, and Ebbesson (2010), society is amidst a third wave of complex systems thinking which conceives that human actions are central in developing more effective governance interventions for climate resilience and adap- tation. Thus, regardless of the structural arrangements in any institution that are designed to support resilience in any system, it is human dimensions and processes – the social construction of key concepts and socially shared interpretations of risk and desirable adaptive behaviour – that need to be more fully investigated in understanding the effectiveness of policy action (Bristow & Healy, 2014).

Various studies have deployed critical discourse analysis techniques to show that the way in which climate change and resilience are perceived is dependent on the specific social systems in the context in which they are negotiated (Brown, Budd, Bell, & Rendell, 2011; Oppermann, 2011). Christmann et al. (2014) also demonstrate that local climate-related perceptions vary considerably such that it is possible to discern a local construction of climate change. This reflects the role of specific local cultures with their own narratives, rationales and temporal structures.

There is increasing recognition that in terms of climate policy implementation (and integration), the understand- ings and action(s) of policy and governance actors at various spatial scales are both paramount and potentially highly variable. They play a fundamental role in (future) position- ing their institutions to enact certain implementation pro- cesses based on policy imperatives that may have been decided ‘upscale’, and yet may implement them very differ- ently. For example, in the European Union a particular (environmental) directive is specific in some form, but the implementation actions that are subsequently deployed at national levels may differ markedly because of the diver- sity and policy interests of different European Union nations (Hooghe, 1996; Jordan, 1999). This process con- tinues with the transfer of policy decisions down from the national to the sub-national scale. For example, Urwin and Jordan (2008) have found that certain adap- tation policies are fundamentally altered, mutated and undermined as they are translated from the national to the sub-national scale, failing to capture some of the cross-sectoral and cross-scalar governance approaches needed for a more holistic, system-based adaptation

The ‘resilience trap’: the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions 1533

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response. Whilst existing national policies like the UK CCRA and NAP attempt to integrate various cross-sec- toral concerns, they struggle to achieve this in practice given the potential for conflict between economic develop- ment priorities and climate adaptation plans. Furthermore, temporality also has a significant effect on the integration of climate policies at sub-national scales of governance (Lorenzoni, Jordan, Hulme, Kerry Turner, & O’Riordan, 2000a; Lorenzoni, Jordan, O’Riordan, Kerry Turner, & Hulme, 2000b). Notwithstanding the limitations of science informing adaptation practices (Kirchhoff, Carmen Lemos, & Dessai, 2013), such work suggests that sub- national scales of governance – particularly more densely populated urban areas where there is increased exposure to climate risks – should be the primary lens of analytical focus if adaptation policy design and governance is to be more iterative, anticipatory and, therefore, more effective.

To date, however, there has been limited interrogation as to the rise of resilience as a discourse in sub-national cli- mate change policy and, particularly, its relation to adap- tation which has to date provided the focus for climate change policy interventions at this scale. The purpose of this paper is to help address this gap by exploring empiri- cally how a range of sub-national policy and governance actors currently understand and operationalize adaptation and resilience in their practical everyday decision-making processes.

RESILIENCE AND ADAPTATION IN SUB- NATIONAL POLICY DISCOURSE

Methodology There have been growing calls for greater empirical interrogation as to how the resilience concept is interpreted and deployed in the discourses and practices of policy- makers (Welsh, 2014). This paper utilizes empirical data from 28 interviews with governance and policy stake- holders conducted across a number of UK city-regions during 2014: Cardiff city-region, Glasgow city-region, and the Yorkshire and Humber sub-region (comprising Leeds, York and Hull city-regions), as well as key national stakeholders involved in promoting climate adaptation and resilience policy across the UK. These city-regions were selected primarily because they reside within different pol- itical and administrative governance contexts with differing priorities as regards adaptation (see below for further dis- cussion). Other studies have solely focused on empirically analysing public sector responses at the local authority level (e.g., Asenova et al., 2015; Porter et al., 2015), but given that other research has argued that successful adap- tation responses rely on both horizontal and vertical multi-scalar governance responses from a variety of actors (Adger et al., 2005; Boyd & Juhola, 2015), this research has examined the perspectives of non-state actors too. This paper specifically focuses on understanding how gov- ernance actors define and interpret resilience and adap- tation in policy discourse and on exploring why particular discourses are becoming prominent. Further details on

interviewees and their professional roles are shown in Table 1.

Interviewees were principally selected using the snow- balling interview technique. This enables the researcher to get inside a particular research network whilst simul- taneously allowing the network to develop the sample of interviewees rather than the researcher randomly interview- ing respondents they feel could contribute to the research (Valentine, 2005). A semi-structured generic topic guide was used to interview the respondents. This guide con- sisted of a number of general themed questions surround- ing adaptation governance and policy including the individual and organization, funding, climate adaptation definitions and policies, climate resilience definitions and policies, stakeholder relationships (governance) and changes, challenges and the future. Interviews were tran- scribed using Microsoft Word, then using a grounded the- ory approach the interview data were coded, conceptualized into groups and categorized to derive certain themes or the- ories, rather than testing out an existing theory inductively or deductively (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). This form of exploratory analysis abductively drew concepts from the empirical data rather than fitting the data into preconceived patterns (Dubois & Gadde, 2002). Case study areas were deliberately chosen that spanned England, Scotland and Wales (and thus different sub-national governance con- texts) because, as explained above, local government responses to adaptation have been based on initiatives and advice (rather than legislation) from central govern- ment. Therefore, one would expect local governance responses to promoting adaptation to be patchy and uneven. The spatial unit of analysis – the city-region – was also chosen because recent years have seen the local level given wider spatial jurisdiction in climate change plan- ning issues through the NPPF and the Local Adaptation Advisory Panel (Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), 2012; HM Government, 2013, p. 184). This paper also acknowledges the importance of work that has concentrated on how cities have been integral in responding to the challenges of climate change (e.g., Bulkeley & Betsill, 2013; Rosenzweig, Solecki, Hammer, & Mehrotra, 2010). However, the city-region scale has become the preferred scale for sub-national governance in the UK in recent years, particularly in England and in relation to the imperatives to support economic develop- ment objectives at an appropriate scale (Parr, 2005; Rodrí- guez-Pose, 2008). It is increasingly acknowledged, however, that the city-region scale should not simply be viewed as appropriate in terms of an economic and admin- istrative logic (Healey, 2009). The physical size of city- regions means that sustainability issues such as climate change require greater strategic focus across a geographical scale that offer for the potential for economic development needs to be mindful of social and ecological concerns (Wheeler, 2009).

Furthermore, institutional support and effectiveness at addressing climate change challenges is likely to vary con- siderably across UK city-regions (Forum for the Future, 2010). Some UK city-regions appear to be becoming

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more attuned to climate adaptation and resilience policy than others. For example, Glasgow has recently been invited to sign up as one of three UK cities to a worldwide climate change city coalition mayors compact (Glasgow City of Science, 2015) and is a member of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities network (Rockefeller Foundation, 2015). Different policy frameworks are also

clearly emerging across the different constituent parts of the UK according to their degrees of devolution. At the UK level, central government is, through the 2008 Climate Change Act, statutorily required to put in place a policy fra- mework for national risk assessments every five years, a UK Committee on Climate Change (which comprises an adap- tation sub-committee), the NAP and the UK Adaptation

Table 1. Country, geographical scale(s), profession and specific role(s) of interview respondents. Country Geographical scale(s) Profession Specific role(s)

UK level National Civil servant, local

council

Local Adaptation Advisory Panel of the Department of

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)

UK level National Civil servant,

Environment Agency

Senior advisor, Climate Ready Programme

UK level National Senior adaptation

analyst

UK Climate Adaptation Sub Committee

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Sustainability and

climate consultant

Member of Adaptation Sub Group, Climate Change

Commission for Wales

Wales National Civil servant Senior climate officer in Welsh government

Wales Cardiff city-region Civil servant Deputy director in the city council

Wales Cardiff city-region Civil servant, city council Sustainable development manager in the city council

Wales Cardiff city-region Civil Servant, city council Sustainable development group leader in the city council

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Civil servant, Natural

Resources Wales

Adaptation team, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and

member of the Adaptation Sub Group, Climate Change

Commission for Wales

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Third sector Chief executive

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Third sector Environmental coordinator

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Third sector Chief executive

Wales National, Cardiff city-region Third sector Coordinator, Climate Change Commission for Wales

England National, regional (Yorkshire

and Humber – all city-regions)

Third sector Regional coordinator and director, Climate UK

England Leeds city-region Civil servant, city council Climate team

England Leeds city-region Civil servant, local

enterprise partnership

Environment lead, Leeds City Region Local Enterprise

Partnership

England Regional (Yorkshire and

Humber)

Third sector Regional campaigner

England National and Hull city-region Civil Servant, city council Environment and climate change strategic advisor and

member of the Local Adaptation Advisory Panel

England Regional (Yorkshire and

Humber) and Hull city-region

Civil servant, local

council

Lead flood risk management officer

England Regional (Yorkshire and

Humber) Hull city-region

Environmental

consultant

Principal environmental consultant

England Leeds city-region Civil servant, city council Flood risk manager, city council

England York city-region Civil servant, city council Flood risk manager, city council

England York city-region Civil servant, city council Sustainability officer, city council

Scotland National Third sector funded by

government

Programme manager, city council

Scotland National Third sector funded by

government

Project manager, city council

Scotland Glasgow city-region Third sector Programme manager, green network

Scotland Glasgow city-region Civil servant, city council Programme manager, city council

Scotland Glasgow city-region Civil servant, city council Principal officer, city council

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Reporting Power. The 2008 Climate Change Act covers all the devolved areas of the UK. Yet additionally, the Climate Change (Scotland) Act of 2009 does require public bodies (including local authorities) in Scotland to report on adap- tation if required by Scottish ministers. In Wales, on 1 April 2016, the Well-Being of Future Generations Act came into force, which requires local authorities to lead on future adaptation issues through public service boards. These statutory requirements suggest that sub-national governance actors (state and non-state) will have an increased role in promoting local adaptation strategies and initiatives and bringing multiple actors together.

Fuzzy definitions and the growing appeal of resilience Across all climate policy actors in the city-regions in our study, it was clear that resilience was becoming prominent in their language and communication and widely used – a rise paralleling the burgeoning use of resilience in various policy and consultation documents relevant to their fields of work. According to one local government climate officer, ‘it has become the in-word to use post-2007’ – a rise he attributed to its use in the area of emergency planning, which is rising to the fore in the context of crisis. Most clearly acknowledged that resilience in policy discourse had become something of a buzzword (Davoudi & Porter, 2012) and yet remained very ‘fuzzy’ in terms of definition and open to mul- tiple interpretations, a typical comment being ‘resilience can mean different things to different people’.

The fuzziness of resilience in policy discourse is most potently illustrated in the tendency for governance actors to conflate resilience and adaptation in practice. One inter- viewee working on adaptation analysis at the UK national level commented on resilience:

It’s starting to be used interchangeably with adaptation really

isn’t it? I attended a meeting…we looked at mitigation a lot

but also adaptation and the feeling amongst the people on the

group was that they preferred the term resilience because it

was… a term that the farming community could sort of

understand a bit and it sounded like a more practical sort

of term to be using.

Another senior local policy interviewee who is also a mem- ber of the Local Adaptation Advisory Panel for the Depart- ment of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) commented:

I tend to use them together, adaptation and resilience.… So

your adaptation measure might be to put in flood defences

which subsequently enables you to increase your resilience

so you are back in business three days later rather than twelve

months later … .

However, some interviewees were keen to highlight the important differences between adaptation and resilience. For example, one local climate policy manager in Glasgow said:

[T]hey are sort of, they are slightly different things.

Obviously resilience is the more sort of pertinent one I

think for higher up policy-makers ’cos [sic] that’s needing

to be able to respond to something when it occurs. Obviously

there’s a large part of adaptation that comes through planning

which is far more longer term and that’s the tricky bit that

involves building in the business cases and what not.… I

mean resilience is an important part of adaptation but it’s

not the whole thing.

Another local climate officer also claimed:

[T]here is a difference. Adaptation is that kind of classical,

but all-encompassing IPCC definition… of the change

that we are facing and the challenge of adapting to that,

whereas resilience is much more a kind of response side for

me.

Articulating that difference in practice was clearly illus- trated as problematic amongst the interviewees, however, and for many, resilience was typically understood as being about ‘being prepared for what is coming’ and as capturing speed of crisis response.

Whilst many interviewees highlighted the potential for confusion around the definition of resilience, they perceived this fuzziness as offering certain advantages. For example, a third-sector representative who works very closely with local government on climate change stated that resilience is a preferred term because it is a better understood concept – ‘I think people get resilience’ – and is seen by many key actors to encapsulate better the need for coping with change and responding to extreme events. Another climate policy interviewee remarked: ‘People resonate with the word resilience because they understand it probably from a personal capacity.’

The intuitive appeal of resilience also reflects the fact that it is a term used across a range of other sub-national policy-making areas such as emergency planning and com- munity development, and because of its seemingly unargu- ably positive connotations. For example, one local climate policy officer from Cardiff claimed:

people just didn’t like the adaptation word, but when we

started using resilience no-one could really argue with that.

Well of course we want to be a resilient city and resilient

local authority…when we went out to the community as

well we’ve done work with the emergency management

unit. They use the resilience term as well, people don’t like

adaptation, it sounds a bit formal … .

Hence, resilience appears to have broad appeal not least because it is a term used in everyday language and in a range of policy areas in sub-national governance and where it appears to be understood as something that works to promote effective self-organization and action.

Other reasons for the growing appeal of resilience are also evident however. A climate policy officer commented that:

1536 Andrew P. Kythreotis and Gillian I. Bristow

REGIONAL STUDIES

part of the reason why we may be aligned to using… resili-

ence more as opposed to adaptation is because [we are] one

of the cities that is now part of the Rockefeller Foundation

Resilient City Network… people are comfortable with the

way that that term has been used there because of the mem-

bership of that network, so it makes sense for consistency that

that is used in terms of communicating around climate

resilience.

In many cases, resilience is also now becoming institutiona- lized within the organizational apparatus of government. For example, one local government sustainability manager stated: ‘I’ve noticed quite a lot of meetings I go to now whereas people were called previously the climate change manager; all of a sudden they are now the resilience man- ager.’ Similarly, in many city-regions, climate change for- ums have been re-named as resilience forums. Another interviewee commented:

For me resilience has a slightly harder edge to it than adap-

tation just from the way it sounds; it sounds a bit more dra-

matic, it’s more spikey.… I think it’s a case of a natural

evolution of the role climate change officers have in order

to survive in their local environment within local authorities.

One interviewee observed that climate change adaptation has been mainstreamed into activities associated with civil contingencies and business resilience.

The appeal of resilience also reflects its apparent ability to mobilize action with greater immediacy. A local climate officer working in the Yorkshire and Humber sub-region highlighted the preference of using the term resilience over adaptation in policy implementation:

I think it’s to attract a greater involvement from people at all

levels. When you talk about [the] need to do an adaptation

measure people switch off. When you say you’ve got to be

resilient to something like flooding, or extreme temperatures

they seem much more interested than when its adaptation

… .

Adaptation appears to be associated with longer-term, pre- paratory actions which are challenging to conceive of and implement, whereas resilience provokes a sense of immedi- ate risks and priority action.

In addition to this, however, they also acknowledged that resilience is more appealing because it brings a wider variety of stakeholders into climate policy discussion, including actors from the community and business sectors. The appeal of the term ‘resilience’ over ‘adaptation’ lies partly in its integrative nature, and potential to act as a boundary-spanning object. For example, one local climate policy officer from the Leeds city-region argued how resi- lience was an integrative term: ‘You use a phrase to describe… the audience you want, that will appeal to them but you can sweep up against so many things in terms of, you know,… it is a good capturing phrase.’ Another stated that it ‘can be framed to basically commu- nicate and win the support of different players’. This has

the potential to engender more networked forms of govern- ance across the city-region for adaptation issues like flood- ing. As one local sustainable development policy officer working in the Hull city-region argued:

You have your businesses, you have got your communities.

We always talk about business resilience, community resili-

ence. Resilience was used quite a lot… in terms of the com-

munities being resilient to flooding, whether it was property

protection or wider scale protection. You might talk about

resilience in the insurance context perhaps, especially the

changes that have happened with flood insurance over the

last year and negotiations going on there.

Resilience is thus understood by the business sector and communities and enables them to be brought into the cli- mate change dialogue.

The ‘resilience trap’ The empirical evidence reported here points to a growing preference to use resilience over adaptation in climate change policy discourse at the city-region scale. This begs the question as to the implications of this for adaptation policy and practice. Is there a danger of adaptation being neglected or downgraded as a climate policy imperative at sub-national scales? This danger is part of what this paper refers to as the ‘resilience trap’.

In deploying the word ‘trap’, this paper is not intending to argue that resilience is wholly problematic (e.g., because it might ostensibly be equated with necessarily ‘good’ outcomes at a particular scale), but rather to point to some potential dangers in the prioritization of a discourse associated with a focus on short-term responses to extreme weather events, or ‘what a community needs to do in a flooding event’, for example, at the expense of longer-term adaptation to climate change. Several interviewees observed that a responsive notion of resilience dominates and that as one policy officer put it, ‘there’s a large part of adaptation that comes through planning which is far more longer term’. One local policy officer working on adaptation issues acknowledged that ‘there’s possibly a danger that the other longer term aspects of adaptation… get side-lined in favour of it’.

A further aspect of the resilience ‘trap’ is the potential for the discourse to be used by some policy-makers to re- badge existing climate initiatives or actions as something new, when in fact the activity has not changed. An intervie- wee from the third sector in Cardiff was quick to point out this danger arguing that the growth of the resilience discourse:

gives the impression that something new is being addressed

or it’s a new approach that we now have to put all our efforts

into understanding…well actually there’s decades of history

that we could look back on and learn from instead of just

thinking there’s always something new to address a problem.

Another interviewee working on climate adaptation policy at the national scale warned of the inherent dangers of using the term to bring together a wider variety of

The ‘resilience trap’: the practical utility of resilience for climate change adaptation in UK city-regions 1537

REGIONAL STUDIES

governance actors and perhaps obfuscate tangible progress in terms of action: ‘I don’t care two hoots what you call it; it’s what you do that counts and I think that is where gov- ernment is at its weakest.’

CONCLUSIONS

This paper has examined the growing appeal of resilience in the discourse around climate change policy at the sub- national scale. It has found that across a sample of UK city-regions, resilience has assumed greater significance in the policy discourse. Furthermore, a particular notion of resilience – resilience as preparedness and responsiveness to crisis – has developed particular appeal, although interpretations of resilience do vary. These emergent alternative interpretations of resilience highlight the impor- tance of language and discourse in the way that policy and governance actors frame responses to climate change (Oppermann, 2011; Ribot, 2011). As such, this paper argues that evident variance in sub-national policy implementation of climate change adaptation may be affected in part at least by how key ideas are interpreted and perceived as much as by problems of translation in the science across policy scales (Urwin & Jordan, 2008).

Whilst the notion of resilience deployed by sub- national governance actors here is acknowledged to be something of a buzzword and invariably fuzzy, this breadth of meaning and interpretation is largely perceived in prag- matic terms to be distinctly advantageous. The appeal of resilience lies principally in its existing use in everyday language by individuals understanding their own capacities to cope with change, and in its increasingly widespread use by other organizations and in other policy contexts where preparedness for risk has to be articulated and understood, and appropriate responses galvanized and configured. In some cases, resilience has been actively transported into cli- mate policy discussions through the influence of powerful external actors such as the Rockefeller Foundation – a prac- tice and outcome that warrants further research. In general, resilience appears to have suitably stoical and positive con- notations as a discursive term, and one which is widely regarded as having significant potential to encourage cross-sectoral dialogue (Shaw, 2012) and mobilize a sense of urgency in the importance of being crisis-ready.

This paper utilizes the notion of the resilience trap to point to some of the potential dangers of the development of this way of framing resilience for climate change adap- tation. Shaw and Maythorne (2013) have argued that the use of resilience can be positive in terms of providing a stra- tegic lynchpin in austere times. However, the interviews conducted also illustrate how the sub-national policy dis- course on resilience could result in the promotion of strat- egies that can reify responses to extreme events in the short- term rather than focus on long-term, potentially more transformative adaptation to climate change (Berrang- Ford et al., 2011; Pelling, 2011; Wise et al., 2014). A responsive notion of resilience is emerging that shows signs of becoming absorbed into wider crisis response and civil contingency actions which, whilst undoubtedly

laudable, run the risk of overriding any focus on longer- term climate change adaptation and still less mitigation measures. Furthermore, the scope for confusion around the definition of resilience in practice runs the risk of hin- dering the development of clear and practical policy action. For example, MacKinnon and Derickson (2013) suggest the term ‘resourcefulness’ may be a suitable replacement for ‘resilience’ given its current propensity to reify dominant modes of global capitalism and place greater burdens on sub-national governance and policy actors to adapt to glo- bal economic and climate shifts.

Further research is clearly needed to understand more fully these risks and their potential to influence climate adaptation in practice. This paper has focused on discursive developments rather than exploring practical policy action and clearly there is more work to be done in understanding how practical policy interventions are shaped in practice. There is also clearly a need to understand better the nature and scale of any differences in policy practices in different city-regions depending upon the role played by key inter- ests and actors in promoting particular discourses and the realities of developing networked governance approaches where different policy powers, resources and priorities effectively collide. It is, however, possible to suggest that policy-makers may take certain actions to avoid falling into the resilience trap, not least of which acknowledging the dangers of over-emphasizing the short-term and devel- oping a clear understanding of how resilience relates to, and differs from, adaptation and mitigation. For example, pol- icy-makers working at the city-region scale will need to ensure long-term planning is incorporated more explicitly into local and community action plans and that a wide range of stakeholders and delivery bodies are involved in this. This is a current policy challenge in Wales where the Well-Being of Future Generations Act requires public service boards to plan explicitly for the long-term resilience of local communities.

However, it is not just the challenge of balancing these competing policy priorities that influences how effectively adaptation imperatives are translated into effective sub- national policy action on the ground, but also how the science around it is interpreted and perhaps more specifically, mediated discursively to invoke practical sub-national action (Corfee-Morlot, Cochran, Hallegatte, & Teasdale, 2010).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Theresa Mercer of Cranfield University for comments made on successive drafts of this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

1538 Andrew P. Kythreotis and Gillian I. Bristow

REGIONAL STUDIES

FUNDING

Special thanks go to the Regional Studies Association for funding this research under an RSA Early Career Grant held by the first author.

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