Adaptive Capacity as a Dynamic Institutional Process: Conceptual Perspectives and Their Application

This paper takes exception to approaches to adaptive capacity derived from either ecology or social science that treat it as a systems response to exposure and vulnerability. It argues that many such approaches are inherently tautological (i.e. adaptive capacity is the ability of a system to adapt) and often provide little more than a classification of the determinants of adaptive capacity without an analysis or explanation of it as a dynamic …