Introduction: governance and adaptation to climate change

The emergent and growing literature on climate change and adaptation seems to have laid aside the effort to define a standardized, universally accepted set of concepts and theoretical frameworks and now acknowledges the coexistence of context-specific vulnerability and adaptation models (Eakin and Luers, 2006; Füssel and Klein, 2006). In effect, the hazard-based, economic-based and climate-based approaches resemble variations in linguistic dialect – similar enough to be mutually intelligible but different enough to create highly nuanced ‘theory communities’. The reality is, however, that hazards (and risk), poverty and global climate change are intimately intermingled in both theory and practice (Halsnaes and Verhagen, 2007; Vogel et al., 2007) – and so must be the models that explain the related dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation. This chapter seeks to contribute to both the scholarly understanding and the praxis of vulnerability and adaptation in specific socio-economic, physical and political contexts by demonstrating how systems of governance act to integrate these variant dimensions of adaptation. The specific context of a drought-affected state in north-east Brazil provides the empirical basis for our argument.

There are four underlying themes present in the variant models of vulnerability and adaptation that seem critical to how the praxis of adaptation unfolds in the face of climate variability and change. The first of these is that the process of adaptation necessarily entails the articulation of different levels of scale.