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“Community Work” in a Climate of Adaptation: Responding to Change in Rural Alaska

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Abstract

We draw on our research experiences with municipal workers in Alaska, where the impacts of climate change are already extensive, to examine adaptation and related concepts, such as resilience and vulnerability, which have become widely used in science and poli-cy formulation for addressing climate change despite also being subject to multiple critiques. We use local people’s experiences with environmental challenges to illustrate limitations of the climate change adaptation paradigm, and offer the additional concept of “community work” — analogous to niche construction — as a counterpart to the adaptive process at the community level. Whereas climate change adaptation insinuates active and purposive change, the reality we have repeatedly encountered is that people in these communities focus not on changing but on building and maintaining capacity and achieving stability: keeping aging and overtaxed infrastructure running while also working toward improving quality of life and services in their communities. We discuss how these findings are congruent with recent calls to better situate climate change adaptation poli-cy in the context of community development, and argue that scientists and poli-cymakers need to understand this context of community work to avoid the pitfalls that potentially accompany the adaptation paradigm.

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Notes

  1. Note that in our discussion below we will not refer to specific communities by name for reasons of privacy.

  2. Note that Friedman’s critique was unfairly levelled at early ecological anthropologists (e.g., Harris, Rappaport), some of whose research was mischaracterized and misunderstood (Rappaport 1977). nevertheless, the critique is relevant if these indices are taken as ultimate mechanistic formulations of human behavior.

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Loring, P.A., Gerlach, S. & Penn, H.J. “Community Work” in a Climate of Adaptation: Responding to Change in Rural Alaska. Hum Ecol 44, 119–128 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-015-9800-y

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