A Critical Analysis of the UK Climate Impacts Programme's Problematization of Adaption.

Oppermann, Elspeth (2012) A Critical Analysis of the UK Climate Impacts Programme's Problematization of Adaption. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis critically analyses the problematization of adaptation to climate change that has emerged at the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP). It finds that its problematization is based on a techno-scientific ontology and epistemology that occludes social forms of knowledge and social contingency. Its political rationale accounts for adaptation as a planned, pre-emptive decision based on existing objectives. This problematization is supplemented by conceptual elements that recognize irreducible uncertainty and social capacity to change which are related to socio-contextual and socio-emergent accounts of adaptation. In articulating these supplementary elements as moments, UKCIP's problematization appears to have broadened, but the nature of this articulation also functions as a 'limit point' (Derrida 1976). Through rendering the contingency and constitution of UKCIP's problematization of adaptation visible, this research enables critical engagement with UKCIP's current discourse and practices. The research builds on existing academic discourses of adaptation and the tools of analysis provided by a Foucaultian-based account of discourse. It operationalizes these at the level of conceptual and linguistic articulation using techniques of analysis from critical discourse analysis, discourse analysis and discourse theory, including Laclau and Mouffes' taxonomy of discourse as constituted by the articulation of elements as moments (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). It also utilizes Derrida and Ranciere's conceptions of the supplement (Derrida 1976, Ranciere 2001] to analyse the effect of this articulation on conceptual inclusion/exclusion. The objectives contributing to this critical analysis are: First, to identify the contingency of emergence of UKCIP's discourse of adaptation; Second, to provide an account of the problematization at the core of this discourse in terms of its content and structure; Third, to explore how the problematization relates to other discourses of adaptation established in the wider literature and determine if, how, and with what implications, these are combined within UKCIP's problematization.