From May 1, Graduate Institute Professor of Development Studies Marc Hufty will direct a Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project entitled “ADAPT² - Adapting to Adaptation: Studying the influence of climate change adaptation discourses and policies on local governance processes".

The project’s premise is that adaptation to climate change aims at reducing the vulnerability and improving the resilience of societies confronted by negative impacts such as drought, floods, landslides, loss of biodiversity and others. Given the present limits of mitigation (suppressing the sources of carbon emissions) adaptation has become one of the international community’s major responses to global change. Most of the programmes and funding mechanisms ultimately focus on local communities and especially governance processes. As climate change is not immediately perceptible for most people (they have to be told that negative events are related to climate change), the research project is based on the assumption that societies adapt primarily to discourses on climate change (what they are being told by experts) and to policies associated with those discourses (funding mechanisms) rather than to climate change itself. Discourses and policies reflect the way climate change and adaptation is conceived at the international and national levels rather than local preoccupation. The more marginalised people are in political, economic and ecological terms, the more so. There is therefore an increasing risk of creating a gap between different levels of governance, making the resources dedicated to adaptation ineffective.

“Adapting to adaptation” refers to how local governance processes and institutions respond or “adapt” to adaptation policies and discourses, an almost unexplored area of environmental governance.

Drawing on tested methodologies and approaches, the team’s aim is to understand this process by comparing cases in three countries: Switzerland, Peru and Pakistan. The research results will be translated into knowledge useful at different levels (local, scientific and for practitioners) to strengthen those institutions that respond to the priorities of local populations.

The research assistants involved in the project will be Mr Morgan Scoville-Simonds and Mr Hameedullah Jamali, both PhD students at the Graduate Institute.

Partners participating in the project include Instituto del Bien Común (IBC), Peru; the Technical University of Pakistan (BUITEMS); Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), Switzerland; Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Free University of Amsterdam, Netherland; and the Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK.

The project has received funding for three years and is hosted by the Graduate Institute’s Centre for International Environmental Studies which focuses on the social and economic issues relating to international environmental problems. 

Marc Hufty's current research activities concentrate on multi-level environmental governance processes. He has taught and done field research in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Madagascar and South Africa. He holds a PhD from the Institute’s predecessor, the Graduate Institute of International Studies.