Social contracts for climate change adaptation: an analytical and normative framework for the distribution of roles and responsibilities

Rapidly increasing climate risks result in a fundamental and quickly growing need for societies to adapt their settlements, infrastructure, managed ecosystems and social systems. In many contexts, this task is so large that is requires to significantly reconsider the roles and responsibilities different actors can and should have in it. Already today, many of the current risk management regimes and their institutionalized distributions of responsibilities are reaching their limits. For example, municipalities around the globe already face difficulties to maintain their established levels of flood risk protection and carry them into the future, hence arguing that private households and firms should more strongly take care of their own protection.

However, to date consistent frameworks to analyze the existing distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation and to guide a future debate on their re-distribution are lacking, both from an analytical as well as normative point of view. We therefore present and discuss a novel framework to that end, using the lens of social contracts. The framework builds on a comprehensive review of the theoretical literature and empirical data acquired in a range of adaptation projects across the globe. The framework differentiates between legalized, otherwise institutionalized, enacted and envisioned social contracts. It helps to not only lay open these individual dimensions but also to examine the rifts between them. It further proposes a typology of different social contracts with a view towards the level of agreement or disagreement different actors have on how they envision the distribution of roles and responsibilities. In doing so, the framework can be applied to different cultural settings across the globe as well as to the analysis and policy guidance from local to global scales. The framework takes temporal dynamics into account in order to effectively inform transition processes within the context of climate resilient development.

The presentation lays out the framework, illustrates it applicability along a number of case studies from different contexts across the globe and discusses its potential for wider application in what is deemed to be a critical decade not only in adaptation science but also adaptation action.