Much ado about nothing? Why adaptation measurement matters

ABSTRACT

Measuring the effectiveness of adaptation and tracking collective progress has received increasing attention across the domains of policy, finance and research. This is linked to the need to monitor and evaluate bilateral and multilateral adaptation finance as well as a commitment in the Paris Agreement to a collective global goal on adaptation and assessing the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation in the global stocktake. In this viewpoint I argue that this focus on defining and measuring adaptation progress has underplayed the importance of how measurement might influence action. Engaging with diverse scholarship on knowledge practices and measurement opens up new perspectives on how measurement might play a role in governing adaptation across scales and the role of experts and forms of knowledge in shaping implementation. These also open up new policy-relevant questions around how metrics can best be designed to be support transformative adaptation action through mechanisms such as incentives, norms and framing. This viewpoint outlines the empirical context and policy space of internationally-financed adaptation efforts, drawing in relevant scholarship applied in similar domains to define an emerging research agenda on the measurement of adaptation as a social and political process that shapes policy, finance and implementation across multiple scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• metrics
• quantification
• finance
• adaptation financing
• adaptation
• climate policy
• UNFCCC

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Decision 1/CMA.3, paragraph 18

2 Results-based management has also been widely critiqued in international development and work such as Valters and Whitty (2017) show the history and political nature of the idea of “effectiveness” in development more broadly.

3 An adaptation planning process mandated by the UNFCCC to address medium to long-term needs.

4 There are some potential limitations to research on this topic. Many instances of results management have been driven by the priorities of international actors and may remain at a level of performance rather than governance. The pool of experience of adaptation measurement – and therefore the data available for analysis – is also fragmented and spread across a variety of contexts with varying degrees of depth.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship: [Grant Number MR/W008572/1].

Notes on contributors

Susannah Fisher

Susannah Fisher is a Principal Research Fellow in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London where she works across research, policy and practice on climate change adaptation. Her research focuses on the politics of adaptation processes and she holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship examining the role of measurement in shaping adaptation action. In previous roles she has worked with international organisations, entrepreneurs, civil society, and local and national governments to develop, implement and evaluate adaptation programmes. She holds a PhD from the geography department at the University of Cambridge.