Adaptive Innovation for Disaster Resilience

Sunil D. Santha is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Livelihoods and Social Innovation, School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.

To develop meaningful disaster resilience strategies, we have to recognise and work with knowledge systems and situated practices of local community actors. Our practice has to be, therefore, rooted in the lived experiences of diverse vulnerable groups and their everyday struggles of interacting with a complex social-ecological system.

Building disaster resilience in a community setting is a complex phenomenon. In the past few years, at the Centre for Livelihoods and Social Innovation, we have been mentoring our postgraduate social work students specialising in Livelihoods and Social Entrepreneurship to equip themselves towards “Adaptive Innovation”. We felt that such an approach was very important and the need of the hour, as currently, any livelihood context concerning the poor and vulnerable groups in our society are interfaced with the impacts of climate change and disaster situations. We believe that the approach of adaptive innovation will enable development practitioners and disaster managers to build disaster-resilient communities in specific socialecological systems. We prefer to use the concept of the social-ecological system as it provides an integrated perspective of humans-in-nature, which recognises that humans and ecosystems are intricately interconnected, each affecting the other, and often in complex ways.

The adaptive innovation model draws inspiration from action research and reflective practice traditions. Adaptive Innovation refers to “people-centred innovation processes by which local community actors collectively analyse their situations in the context of social and ecological transitions, forge a constructive partnership with other relevant actors to dialogue, ideate and develop working models, and implement and critically observe, reflect and validate their adaptive strategies to the emergent contexts. These processes are situated, reflective, context-specific, developmental and committed to the values of care, justice and solidarity” (Santha, 2020).

 The ultimate aim of adaptive innovation is to nurture caring solidarity, strengthen adaptive capacities, transform institutions as people-centred and enhance the resilience of social-ecological systems through collective decisionmaking and action. The goal here is to design people-centred resiliencebuilding strategies that could have the intent and effect of our decisions and actions on the structures and processes shaping equality and justice, care and empowerment for those who are disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society (Ibid).

The core components of an adaptive innovation model are (a) the guiding values of justice, care and solidarity that are embedded within (b) the six phases of the adaptive innovation cycle and enriched by (c) reflective practice and (d) analysis of actor interfaces in adaptation. Building disaster resilience based on ethical practice is only possible if we embed our thoughts and actions with the values of justice, care and solidarity. A single conceptualisation of a normative distributive justice may not help us to build disaster resilience.

We have to be aware of the nature of structural inequalities and forces shaping these structures to effectively work out strategies for disaster resilience. The poor and marginalised sections in a community often have limited access to institutions and resources, thus constraining their participation and decision-making capacities to mitigate risks or cope with them. Apart from distributive justice, aspects of procedural and structural justice also need to be given due emphasis while building disaster resilience initiatives. And the consequences of such an approach will have its impact across both intersectional and intergenerational spheres of community life.

The ethics of care emphasises that the foundations of our practice based on love, empathy, compassion, sensitivity and responsiveness is equally important as justice to build a resilient world. These qualities enable us to build trust and mutual concern for our fellow beings. Such a perspective also provides sufficient scope to recognise that caring as a value and practice is also a way to repair and heal our worlds through rebuilding and restoring relationships of interdependence and reciprocal responsibilities. As social workers or as disaster managers, we should not only have appropriate motivations in providing care but also possess essential skills in rendering effective practices of care. As professionals in this complex field of practice, we should nurture and appreciate the qualities of mindfulness, humility and authenticity to provide and receive care in the respective community contexts. We also need to maintain the right attitude of being patient and culturally sensitive, open-minded and empathetic to the everyday lived realities of community actors.  

Solidarity entails the recognition that resilience-building is a collective project. Adhering to the fairness of procedures with a sense of caring and reflexive solidarity would make the idea of disaster resilience meaningful. Vulnerable and dependent people will count on relationships and networks of solidarity to seek care as well as justice. To nurture and sustain solidarity in resilience-building projects, we have to ensure that a diversity of experiences and ideas are heard and explored together on how we could overcome differences by creating bonds of cooperation. Instead of simply providing some space for dialogue, we should aim at strengthening the processes of active citizenship such that local community actors participate as well as have collective ownership in resilience-building projects. Towards this, we have a crucial role in enabling local community actors to identify and leverage existing strengths as a solidarity group rather than imposing them from outside. In this context, communitybased innovation platforms have an important role in facilitating and strengthening disaster resilience. These innovation platforms have to be understood as collective and collaborative institutional spaces owned and governed by community actors in partnership with other relevant stakeholders to mutually share knowledge, imagine and innovate situated practices that could reduce vulnerabilities and build the resilience of social ecological systems.

The six practice phases of the adaptive innovation cycle are (i) Situational Analysis (ii) Micro- Mobilisation (iii) Dialogic Ideation (iv) Action Framing (v) Piloting (vi) Emergence. Each phase of innovation is visualised as a process of discovering and reflecting on new ways of forging partnerships, nurturing participation and cocreating actionable solutions. The whole cycle is indicative of an iterative and reflective pathway to design diverse resilience-building strategies suiting local contexts and knowledge systems. Each phase in the adaptive innovation model can be understood briefly as follows:

* Situational analysis is the process of understanding the vulnerability contexts, livelihood practices, adaptation trends and other key issues affecting diverse community actors in a given social-ecological system.

*Micro-mobilisation is a strategic process aimed at organising community actors to participate collectively through innovation platforms in devising suitable resilience-building strategies.

*Dialogic ideation is a process of collective imagination where community actors in partnership with other stakeholders attempt to ideate and co-create multiple resiliencebuilding pathways through in-depth deliberations, dialogue and other forms of shared conversations and decision-making.

*Action framing refers to the collective and participatory processes that involve translating emergent ideas into meaningful sensory experiences, images or visuals of action. It allows for systematic exploration of actionable possibilities. Action framing aims to explore the feasibility and resilience of broader ideas, generate shared experiences, identify resources and foresee the nuisances of implementing the idea into an actionable model.

*Piloting refers to iterative and reflective processes aimed at implementing and testing the suitability, feasibility and effectiveness of working models.

*In a complex social-ecological system, disaster resiliencebuilding processes can be full of surprises. Emergence refers to the emerging self-organised patterns of systemic arrangements, which are both intended and unintended consequences of a resiliencebuilding project.

Any process of building disaster resilience can only be strengthened through reflective practice. Critical reflexivity also involves questioning our positional ties, assumptions and actions as development practitioners or disaster managers. Reflective practice can be understood as iterative cycles of action-reflection, where reflection on action taken at each phase of adaptive innovation would set the stage for the next phase. The whole process of resilience building has to be understood as a kind of collective and collaborative learning where participant actors co-evolve strategies by thinking, doing and reflecting on the doing. These actors need to be consistently involved in a process of reflectionfor- action, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.

Community-based resiliencebuilding strategies need to be contextualised and reflected upon as interfaces between diverse actors in different relations of power, whose outcome depends upon the capacities, tactics and rationality of respective actors in making suitable decisions. Actors in this context should not be viewed as passive recipients of resilience building interventions. Instead, they have to be recognised as active stakeholders with specific knowledge and capacity for action. The recognition that there is competing knowledge and interest in any given situation also helps us to remain alert to power relations and ideological issues interfacing with our practice. The interface approach emphasises the specifics of social contexts characterising every social encounter. If not nurtured sensitively, these social encounters can become sites of domination and spaces for the perpetuation of mere sociotechnical interest.

To develop meaningful disaster resilience strategies, we have to recognise and work with knowledge systems and situated practices of local community actors. Our practice has to be therefore rooted in the lived experiences of diverse vulnerable groups and their everyday struggles of interacting with a complex social-ecological system. Navigating collectively through shared conversations and dialogic processes, we could embark on an enduring journey where diverse actors would mutually learn, innovate and make informed choices to enhance the safety and security of their lived environment. [Note: A detailed version of the Adaptive Innovation Model is available in my recently published book ‘Climate Change and Adaptive Innovation: A Model for Social Work Practice, published by Routledge].

References:

Santha, S.D. 2020. Climate Change and Adaptive Innovation: A Model for Social Work Practice, Oxon: Routledge.

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