Place attachment, identity, and adaptation

The adaptive challenge of climate change involves both collective and individual action. Most public discourse on climate change includes discussions on what governments should do to impose order and sustainability onto otherwise reckless and destructive behavior by individuals. We need, apparently, to be constrained by a higher order from inflicting harm on ourselves and on the global environment. Ultimately, however, governments themselves are constrained in their ability to steer action within their jurisdictions by the culture and politics of the governed. The relationship between state and citizen is an outcome of what we, as citizens, are prepared to accept and to relinquish to that higher level. In this chapter we focus on identity as the primary means by which individuals and communities construct their decision-making frame of reference and which they seek to include in the governance of resources and lives. We show that identity and place attachment are central to well-being; they are also central to how risks, such as those posed by climate change, are framed and managed and how responses by governments and other agencies are deemed to be appropriate, legitimate, or fair. As such, identity and place attachment influence how individuals and community construct their social contract with higher levels of authority. This set of relationships between individuals, their identities, attachment to place, and the structures of governance they sit within, we assert, is central to the adaptive challenge of climate change. We begin by reviewing the state of knowledge on identity, on place attachment, and on their role in constructing perceptions of fairness, linking to the key justice issue of climate change as an imposed harm (Adger et al. 2006). We then examine how this knowledge has been selectively applied in analyzing responses to weather-related risks and the implications for long-term planning and adaptation. Hence we make the case for the analysis of place, identity, and their manifestation in behavior, within the larger collective challenge of adapting to different risks and climates, now and in the future. Relating Identity to Adaptation and Justice Individuals are located within social networks, fulfilling a variety of roles depending on context. These elements of identity are not fixed: People interpret information they receive about themselves from others and consider whether this information reinforces their desired position in these networks, or whether interactions contradict their self-perceptions.