Adaptive policing for a climate crisis

ABSTRACT

Climate change is the ‘defining issue of our time’ and human societies face extraordinary and growing hazards that threaten public safety, social cohesion, and the economy. Heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion are projected to increase in frequency and severity and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long called upon societies around the world to urgently improve their capacity ‘to moderate or avoid harm’. In this essay, we call on policing actors and researchers to embrace this call and urgently consider how emerging and existential threats attributed to climate change may impact the regulation and protection of social order around the world. We argue that aligning the mentalities, functions, and capabilities of policing institutions and networks with ‘whole-of-society’ or systemic attempts to promote ‘adaptive governance’ is vital for governing security in the Anthropocene, characterised by ‘dissolving boundaries between humans and nature’. From both an institutional and systemic standpoint this shift is necessary however, police agencies and policing systems may lack the inclination or capacity to make this transition and may even actively resist or obstruct transformative agendas. We argue that the concept of ‘adaptation’ offers a potentially productive vehicle for navigating this emergent policing frontier, and for getting from where we are, to where we might want to go.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• adaptation
• disasters
• policing crises

Welcome to our climate crisis

Our world experienced several high-profile disasters attributed to climate change during the three-years it took us to write this essay. Many of these have been described as ‘unprecedented’ in terms of their onset, severity, complexity, and consequences. Between June and October 2022, for example, more than one-third of Pakistan’s land area was affected by severe flooding that was attributed to a heavy monsoon season and melting glaciers. More than 1700 people were killed, 8 million people were displaced, and the total estimated damage was estimated at $14.9bn USD (Ministry of Planning Development & Special Initiatives 2022). The Pakistani Government and the United Nations attributed this disaster to climate change.

Less than six-months earlier, eastern Australia experienced one of its worst flood disasters on record. Compared to the floods in Pakistan, the impacts were mitigated by several factors including the nature and scale of the hazard, physical and human geography, and the preparedness and resilience of impacted communities. Nevertheless, despite Australia’s material advantages, sophisticated and comparatively well-resourced emergency management infrastructure, and established disaster risk reduction systems and methods, 22 lives were lost, tens-of-thousands of people were forced to evacuate homes and businesses, and an estimated $5.87bn AUD in claims were incurred by insurers (Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience 2022, pp. 43–49). Lives and livelihoods across Southern Queensland and Northern New South Wales were disrupted, and the viability of entire communities was called into question (Settle 2022). Once again, the ‘supercharged’ La Nina cycle which caused this flooding was attributed to global warming and climate change, with researchers rejecting the characterisation of this disaster as a ‘one in a thousand-year event’ (Quiggin 2022). The recurrence of floods across Australia during the 2023 La Nina season seemingly supported this critique, along with an argument that severe and recurring hydrological disasters must be understood and governed as ‘new normals’ (Mutongwizo et al. 2024).

Unfortunately for Australia and other countries which have experienced hydrological disasters over the past few years, the onset of El Nino offered no relief from the normalisation and escalation of extreme weather events. Heatwaves have historically been the deadliest disasters and it is estimated that 37% of warm-season heat-related deaths worldwide are attributable to climate change, with heat-related deaths projected to increase in the coming years and decades (Vicedo-Cabrera et al. 2021). It was also only a few years prior to the 2022 floods, in the months preceding the Covid-19 pandemic, that millions of hectares of land across Australia, Brazil and North America were scorched by wildfires. Due to the intense and prolonged La Nina cycles noted above, the return of El Nino in 2023 contributed to another wave of ‘unprecedented’ fires and heatwaves across North America and Europe. As of October 2023, more than 18.5 million hectares burned in Canada, more than double the previous record of 7 million hectares set in 1995 (Livingston 2023). Meanwhile, the 2023 El Nino season caused an unprecedented heatwave across the southwestern United States. Like the wildfires in Canada, this regional heat wave persisted for more than a month, with the city of Phoenix, Arizona experiencing 31 consecutive days of 110F + weather in June and July (Associated Press 2023).

Although most residents of Arizona have learned to live with heat, a population’s exposure and vulnerability to heatwaves is not uniform. It is well-established, for example, that people experiencing homelessness, older adults, and very young children are over-represented in heat wave mortality data. The fact that urban areas are typically several degrees warmer than suburban or rural areas also suggests that populations who live in areas of concentrated disadvantage may face greater exposure to these risks (Hsu et al. 2021). Eric Klinenberg’s (2003) ground-breaking ‘social autopsy’ of the 1995 Chicago heat wave further revealed how social, political, and economic structures (re)produce and exacerbate conditions which help explain the distribution of mortality rates between different communities of place during disasters. Even where communities understand disaster risks, they may still lack or be denied the assistance, infrastructure, or resources required to mitigate or adapt (Thomas et al. 2019).

A particularly unsettling scenario arises when unexpected disasters unfold in the blind-spots of dominant Western approaches to risk-based disaster governance (Tierney 2012), including hazard forecasting (Doorn 2015) and capacity building (Hagelsteen and Becker 2019). This indicates a shift to a world where the categorical boundaries between ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ becomes increasingly permeable and difficult to negotiate. Complexity is increasingly described as a defining feature of this world (Duit and Galaz 2008), and established governance systems struggle when it comes to interpreting and managing the risks posed by new and emerging ‘harm landscapes’ (Berg and Shearing 2018). The 2023 wildfires in Maui illustrate this point.

On the 8th of August, Hawaii experienced its deadliest disaster in state history when wildfires struck Maui, destroying the coastal town of Lahaina, and killing one-hundred people (Hawaii State Department of Health 2023). Although wildfires are an annual occurrence on Maui and scientists and state officials recognised that the island faced an increased risk of wildfires due to a combination of El Nino conditions, strong winds, and poor land management practices, few predicted a disaster of this scale, let alone the exact circumstances that sparked it. In fact, at the time of drafting this essay, the exact cause of the wildfires remained contested, with the Maui County government alleging in a lawsuit against a publicly traded utility company that the disaster was caused by downed power lines which did not meet regulatory standards. In hindsight, various commentators have suggested that this confluence of risk factors should have been recognised by state officials so that appropriate actions could have been taken to reduce the possibility of a disaster occurring (Arango et al. 2023). Perhaps, but even if we accept that this complex disaster resulted from a ‘known unknown’, it is unlikely that sufficient capacity, governmental and private sector, existed to manage these risks effectively. Adaptive governance scholars (see for example Chaffin et al. 2014) thus recognise that modern institutions, models, and methods of governance struggle to deal with complexity because they are overwhelmingly reductionist and human-centric, non-reflexive (i.e. they fail to account for ‘how our actions feedback to shape our environment’ (Sterman 2006, p. 508)), are slow to register and adapt to changes and disruptions, and have a tendency to focus on immediate risks and rewards at the expense of measures designed to promote sustainability and systemic resilience.

Furthermore, we might speculate that the Maui fires should lead to improvements to the island’s preparedness for future wildfire disasters. But will these incremental measures prove sufficient in the long-run, or will a more radical and transformative approach to adaptation be necessary for effectively governing disaster risks on the island? This question brings us face-to-face with the most distressing risk environment that confronts us in the early decades of the twenty-first century: a world of ‘known knowns’ with profound existential implications.

Since the Cold War,¹ ‘known knowns’ have generated less anxiety amongst security experts than ‘known unknowns’ or ‘unknown unknowns’ because they are considered predictable and therefore governable. When it comes to climate change, however, our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the causes of global warming, along with the inability and unwillingness of states and corporations to take necessary actions to mitigate its impacts (White 2018), elicits a sense of futility and associated ‘eco’ – and ‘climate-anxiety’ (see for example, Usher et al. 2019, Hickman 2024). Sadly, the scientific consensus is that based on current economic growth trajectories, the long-term prognoses for both our species and our planet are poor. For example, soon after the publication of the Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a trio of vice-chairs wrote in an op-ed that ‘Even if we manage to stop the planet from warming beyond 1.5°C this century, we will still see profound impacts to billions of people on every continent and in every sector, and the window to adapt is narrowing quickly’ (Howden et al. 2022).

Adaptation and policing in the ‘Anthropocene’

Despite these gloomy assessments, Harrington and Shearing (2017) and others argue that we must continue to work towards developing political and technical interventions that will enable us to prolong and make the most of our time on this planet. From this perspective, we must recognise that the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ world are one, and that the ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), a term proposed to recognise humans as geological actors (Chakrabarty 2009) and their impact on our current geological epoch, is characterised by ‘dissolving boundaries between humans and nature’ (Holley et al. 2020, p. 349). This idea has long influenced the governing mentalities and practices of indigenous societies around the world (Berkes 2009, Whyte 2017), yet it conflicts with the entrenched Durkheimian (1892/1982) conception of a bifurcated social and a natural sphere understood as ‘sui generis’ realities and the associated modern idea of ‘development’, its extractive tendencies, and the prescribed roles and functions of state-based policing agencies and late-modern policing networks (see for example, Goyes et al. 2017, Dunlap and Brock 2022). To this effect, some political economists argue that the concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ is preferable to the ‘Anthropocene’ when it comes to describing the historical drivers of our climate crisis (Moore 2017). In this tradition, critical green criminologists draw attention to the political and economic forces of capitalism and their contribution to environmental harms (Lynch et al. 2013, Ruggiero and South 2013, Lynch 2020). These scholars have generally embraced a radical political agenda for environmental change that aligns with calls for states to ‘defund’ or ‘abolish’ police. For example, Dunlap and Brock’s (2022) edited volume, Enforcing Ecocide, presents several case studies which illustrate how established policing models contribute to ecological destruction and suppress environmental activist movements around the world.

While there is certainly merit in this perspective, it is unclear how these critical analyses might be mobilised to bring about institutional and systemic change in the realm of policing. Accordingly, we seek to shift the focus of our field to the question of how the mentalities, functions, and capabilities of policing institutions and networks are being, and might be, brought into alignment with broader climate governance initiatives. We do so by drawing on the work of governance researchers who have long embraced the concepts of ‘adaptation’ and ‘adaptive governance’ as vehicles for facilitating shifts in governance arrangements and practices (Djante et al. 2011, Chaffin et al. 2014). Although they have written relatively little about policing (but see Holley et al. 2020), environmental governance scholars have been interested in enhancing ‘[institutional] capacity to respond to change and even transform social-ecological systems into improved states’ (Folke et al. 2005, p. 463).

Policing constitutes an important element of modern and late modern governance arrangements and must be included in this process. Even if we accept the critique of policing actors as allies or enablers of harmful political and economic forces, we must simultaneously acknowledge that policing landscapes are being, and will be, fundamentally transformed by acute and chronic hazards associated with climate change (Matczak and Bergh 2023). Police as long-established emergency management actors and first responders with a ubiquitous presence in communities around the world, have played, and will increasingly play a role in managing the impacts of acute and chronic disasters (Cordner and Wright 2024). As discussed below, an ‘adaptation’ lens may support the identification or imagination of new possibilities for governing and delivering security as public, common, or collective goods in a climate crisis (Berg and Shearing 2018, Mattos and Henao 2021). These new possibilities include enhancements in maintaining order in emergency contexts. They also potentially include forms of policing that embraces an ‘ethos of care’ (Harrington and Shearing 2017) which are focused on protecting, and potentially empowering, vulnerable constituencies (see for example, Marks et al. 2020, Windle et al. 2020).

From disaster policing to adaptative policing

From a policing perspective, the risks and challenges associated with climate change are diverse and imprecise. Whereas episodic looting or opportunistic criminality during disaster events align with existing public order policing functions and disaster management plans, the possibility of widespread civil unrest and disorder caused by resource scarcity or breakdowns of critical infrastructure pose new challenges that promise to stretch the capabilities and remits of traditional policing actors (Varano and Schafer 2012, Frailing and Harper 2017, Matczak and Bergh 2023). Historically, these worst-case policing scenarios during disasters caused by natural hazards have been the exception rather than the norm (for example, during Hurricane Katrina, see Deflem and Sulphin 2009), but they may become more frequent as the social and environmental impacts of climate change become more chronic, complex, and pervasive (Chambers 2011). In these contexts, emergency management may emerge as a prominent feature of everyday policing portfolios as ecological instabilities caused by climate change establish ‘new normals’. A recent study in Australia led by two of the authors, Blaustein and Miccelli, illustrates this phenomenon at the local level by documenting how police in Victorian communities exposed to recurring bushfire hazards embraced emergency management, including planning and preparedness, as a local policing priority (Blaustein et al. 2023).

Blaustein et al.’s (2023) study illustrates that learning from the past and documenting how police manage shocks and disruptions is vital for improving the ability of policing actors and networks to respond to complex risk landscapes in the future. Accessing this knowledge is critical for improving the adaptive capacity of police organisations, conceptualised by the IPCC (2007, sec. 17.3.1) as, ‘the ability or potential of a system [including constituent institutions, nodes and, networks] to respond successfully to climate variability and change, and includes adjustments in both behaviour and in resources and technologies’.

Applying the concept of adaptive capacity to the field of policing is interesting because the existing literature establishes that modern police organisations are far from the most adaptive, innovative, or responsive governing institutions. At the same time, the literature highlights that incremental changes and improvements can potentially be achieved and sustained by police organisations (Chan 1997, Mastrofski and Willis 2010). The burgeoning field of ‘evidence-based policing’ and its growing, albeit uneven, influence on policy and practice around the world provides support for this possibility (Sherman 2013). It also demonstrates how calls for change and innovation can generate resistance from policing professionals (Kuen et al. 2023). Obstacles such as resistance, cynicism, indifference, mistrust, or simply a lack of resources or time all help to explain the limited adaptive capacity exhibited by police organisations over the past fifty years (Skogan 2012). The current socio-political environment surrounding policing in countries like the United States further contributes to police stress (Saunders et al. 2019) and represents a significant barrier to collaborative problem-solving and ‘boundary work’ (Crawford and L’Hoiry 2017).

In our climate crisis, these challenges are further compounded by the need for police practitioners and researchers to develop strategies for understanding and engaging with temporal domains that remain largely enigmatic to the institutions of ‘modern’ governance. There are of course existing models and methods of strategic forecasting which are utilised by police and other security actors to inform strategic planning and resourcing decisions (see for example, College of Policing 2020) however, none of these have been developed to conceptualise and govern policing landscapes across all three temporalities: the everyday, the emerging, and the existential (Crawford 2018). Our contention is that modern, state-centric policing entities are fundamentally concerned with the governance of everyday threats, particularly as the perceived immediacy of problems, hazards and risk plays an important role in shaping how limited police time, resources, and personnel are allocated. Partly for this reason, police-centric policing in many jurisdictions remains overwhelmingly reactive in nature despite enduring calls for pro-active, preventative or predictive policing models (Dahl et al. 2022). The mundane reality is that most police officers and organisations simply lack the capacity to continuously plan and prepare for distant, hypothetical, and novel hazard scenarios.

Late modern policing models (for example, Mazerolle and Ransley 2006) and webs (Brodeur 2010) evolved in response to emerging risks, and the perceived limitations of modern, state-centric approaches when it comes to managing everyday problems and emerging risks (Bayley and Shearing 1996). The governance of risk across these two temporalities will remain integral to policing in a climate crisis, but it remains unclear how established institutions, networked models, or even technological innovations might be harnessed to police existential threats or govern our ontological security, a concept which denotes ‘not only the protection of a sovereign territory and human and non-human bodies, but also the preservation of identities, stable environments of action and relations to ourselves, nature and others’ (Mattos and Henao 2021, p. 122). This is not a dilemma we are equipped to resolve at the present time, but it is one that we as researchers and practitioners must acknowledge, lest ‘activities aimed at preserving the security of a particular social order, or social order in general’ (Reiner 2010, p. 6) find themselves in conflict with societal efforts to manage and mitigate Anthropogenic or Capitalocentric harms. This possibility is highlighted by Ghazinour and Rostami (2022) in their recent work on ‘police resilience’ while the wider, interdisciplinary literature on systemic resilience and vulnerability supplies policing researchers and practitioners a useful starting point for imagining productive, adaptative trajectories.

Resilience, vulnerability and policing

‘Resilience’ sits at the heart of several governmental paradigms and agendas which have emerged in response to growing concerns about climate change. The complex genealogy of the concept has been analysed by several scholars who describe its definitional ambiguity as both a strength and a limitation (see for example, Walker and Cooper 2011, Alexander 2013, Bourbeau 2018). On the one hand, the concept of ‘resilience’ is intuitively appealing and malleable enough to accommodate various interests and agendas, thereby creating a framework for building broad consensuses involving a diverse array of stakeholders (Béné et al. 2012). Definitional ambiguity also ensures that the concept and the governmental agendas it informs can be adapted and adjusted in response to (and ideally in anticipation of) systemic changes and emerging hazards (Strunz 2012). A downside of this malleability is that the lack definitional precision may dilute the concept’s value as a framework for advocating any specific governmental agenda, particularly one which seeks to contest the status quo and promote radical change.

Conversely, scholars also observe that the concept has been widely co-opted by political and economic elites who seek to divest themselves of responsibility for addressing the Anthropogenic drivers of climate change or for decreasing the vulnerability of communities to associated hazards (Tierney 2015). In this regard, ‘resilience’ is said to have important blind-spots which relate to social justice, power relations, and the distributional effects of risk and protective measures. Echoing Valverde’s (2011) critique of the nebulous concept of ‘security’, we argue that policing researchers and practitioners must acknowledge the potential uses and abuses of resilience as a governmental rationality and question what it means to govern and police in the name of ‘resilience’ (see for example, Dupont et al. 2023).

For our purposes, we adopt the IPCC’s (2012, p. 5) widely cited definition of ‘resilience’ as the ‘ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner’ as a starting point for this discussion. As with our definition of adaptive capacity above, we conceptualise the police and policing as ‘component parts’ of a larger system and consider the implied interdependency between them. Simply put, systemic changes and hazardous events will impact policing landscapes, while policing activities and capabilities may enhance or detract from the system’s ability to ‘anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover’ from shocks. As Ghazinour and Ristami (2022) observe, few policing researchers have adopted a systems-based approach to theorising or measuring the resilience of police organisations to shocks and disruptions, with most of the existing literature on police resilience instead focusing on individual psychological or physiological effects of stressors and trauma (for example, see Janssens et al. 2021).

Individual resilience might be theorised as an important component of a resilient socio-ecological system or governance network, but adaptive governance researchers largely reject the idea that complex environmental risks can be governed through responsibilisation strategies or behavioural interventions alone (Holley et al. 2012). Equally, they accept that state and market-based interventions have their own limitations when it comes to governing complex and potentially catastrophic environmental risks. Building resilient crisis governance systems which can manage risk across multiple temporalities thus necessitates considered and continuous coordination between multiple spheres, sites, and sources of governmental capacity.

Béné et al.’s (2012) ‘3-D’ resilience framework draws attention to three important features of resilient systems. The first element, ‘absorptive coping’, is oriented towards enabling systems and their components to prevent, mitigate, and resist the effects of disruptive shocks. This entails promoting stability and continuity in the face of disruptions. The second element, ‘adaptation’, centres on incremental adjustments that enable a system and its parts ‘to continue functioning without major qualitative changes in function or structural identity’ (Béné et al. 2012, p. 22). Here, the emphasis is on flexibility. Finally, the ‘transformation’ is said to occur when adaptive responses are no longer sufficient for managing disruptive changes. A key distinction between ‘transformation’ and ‘adaptation’ then is that the former typically challenges the status quo and entails ‘the questioning of values, the challenging of assumptions, and the capacity to closely examine fixed beliefs, identities, and stereotypes’ (Béné et al. 2012, p. 22).

The 3-D resilience framework is particularly useful for exploring the intersections between policing and climate change at both an institutional and a systemic level. At an institutional level, the focus is on how policing agencies and partnerships are impacted by and responding to climate change and associated disaster risks. For example, we might seek to identify what measures have been put in place to enable police organisations to ensure continuity of service during complex emergencies which generate significant demands on police personnel and resources. Once police have fulfilled their emergency management roles, their focus might then be to promptly return to ‘business as usual’ (BAU) activities (Blaustein et al. 2023). Alternatively, evidence of adaptation might be found in relation to the institutionalisation of lessons or learnings from previous disasters within police organisations, or wider emergency management systems. If, for example, it is determined that a particular process or method proved inadequate in managing disaster risk, or alternatively, that promising innovations were inspired by recent events and experiences, then we might seek to understand how and why this knowledge was (or was not) utilised to enhance the institutional capabilities of police in anticipation of future crisis scenarios. More ambitiously, from a transformational perspective, we might consider whether these experiences prompted the organisation and its members to re-assess its values, mandate, and functions.

At the systemic level, these questions are perhaps even more interesting insofar as they prompt us to think about how policing actors see and position themselves within wider webs or networks of governance. Upgrading communication systems and protocols may, for example, enhance the ability of police organisations to anticipate risk and pre-emptively allocate staff and resources for emergency management roles, thereby reducing disruptions to BAU policing. The creation of new roles which centre on full-time emergency management liaison work may also signal an adaptive shift which signifies institutional recognition of the fact that governance landscapes are changing, and police organisations must follow-suit or at least remain abreast of these shifts (Blaustein et al. 2023).

Finally, perhaps it is even foreseeable that one day, policing institutions may come to realise that any ‘set of activities aimed at preserving the security of a particular social order, or social order in general’ (Reiner 2010, p. 5) which are anchored in preserving a growth agenda are themselves a threat to our existential security (Sears 2020). A transformational shift of this nature might therefore recast policing as a set of activities aimed at managing the disruptive effects of catastrophic risks and our governmental responses in an equitable, efficient, and responsive manner that expresses an ‘ethos of care’ (Harrington and Shearing 2017). This play on Reiner’s classic definition is clearly aspirational, but fits with and supports Béné et al.’s (2012, p. 48) articulation of ‘good resilience’ which refers to

the ability of a system to accommodate positively adverse changes and shocks, simultaneously at difference scales, and with consideration of all the different components and agents of the system [including policing actors and institutions], through the complementarities of its absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities.

This implies that all three components, individually and collectively, are crucial ingredients of systemic resilience.

Confronting the paradoxes of policing in a climate crisis

Adaptation and transformation cannot occur in the absence of strong and stable institutions, hence the importance of absorptive coping. At the same time, in the face of chronic and cascading crises, the absorptive capacity of a system and its parts will decrease over time in the absence of adaptive and transformative initiatives (Béné et al. 2012). Adaptive and transformative agendas may reflect significant political and ideological differences, with the latter typically aligning with radical prescriptions for change, and the latter with a progressive orientation. As critical green criminologists observe, there is potential for conflict here, particularly in a climate crisis, where many believe that a radical political and economic changes are urgently required to mitigate existential risks. Although perhaps unaware of their own positionality, the surveillance (Monaghan and Walby 2017) and criminalisation of climate activism movements around the world means that police increasingly find themselves in conflict with proponents of transformative agendas (Di Ronco 2023, Selmini and Di Ronco 2023), including indigenous populations whose ideas about environmental sustainability are increasingly being embraced by Western adaptive governance scholars (Crosby and Monaghan 2016). The policing of environmental activist movements is not a new phenomenon (see for example Stephens-Griffin 2021), but it denotes an important source of tension between the specific ordering functions of police (Marenin 1982), often aligned with environmentally harmful political and economic interests, and the need for governments and societies to embrace radical change.

Paradoxically then, the conservative functions of policing which may be conceptualised as an asset during acute emergencies when command-and-control capabilities are essential (Blaustein et al. 2023), may ultimately undermine systemic and societal resilience. In this regard, various aspects of BAU policing have also been theorised as potential sources of individual and social vulnerability, particularly where they serve to entrench and reproduce conflicts or divisions, compound disadvantage, or destabilise social order (Morabito 2014, Asquith et al. 2017). At the same time, many police organisations and policing researchers are increasingly attuned to the issue of vulnerability, and the need to provide responsive policing services to individuals and groups deemed ‘vulnerable’ as an expression of an ‘ethos of care’ – an idea that the notion of ‘resilience policing’ recognises (Mutongwizo et al. 2021). There is significant variation in how the concept of vulnerability is understood and operationalised by policing actors (Keay and Kirby 2018), but the idea that policing may alleviate or contribute to systemic vulnerabilities has attracted limited scholarly discussion beyond the emerging sub-field of law enforcement and public health (van Dijk and Crofts 2017). More broadly, researchers who study ‘complex adaptive systems’ emphasise that vulnerability needs to be conceptualised as a dynamic process rather than ‘a static and constant state’, and argue that adopting a systems-level perspective may help to promote ‘interoperability [between different nodal actors] that facilitates overall system function’ (Naylor et al. 2020, p. 452).

Additional questions for scholars and practitioners who embrace our call for adaptive policing to consider include: who is resilience for, what does it promise, and what does it really deliver (Manyena 2006, Gaillard 2010, McDonnell 2020)? It is well established, for example, that every policy creates winners and losers, so we must consider the distributional impacts of any governing initiative or intervention that purports to improve societal resilience to disasters or crises. This holds true for policing during disasters when police activities, decisions, and interactions have the potential to mitigate or exacerbate social inequities that influence who can access limited resources and emergency support services. Furthermore, Lewis and Kelman (2012) remind us that disasters occur because governmental actors create exposure and sensitivity to hazards while depriving individuals and populations of resources which support their adaptive capacity. For our purposes, this prompts consideration of how everyday policing activities may create or exacerbate social vulnerability to disasters, particularly amongst marginalised groups who are commonly described as over policed and under protected.

Finally, from a constructivist standpoint, we might also interrogate the governance of resilience in much the same way as international relations scholars from the Copenhagen School have studied ‘securitization’ in recent decades (Buzan et al. 1998). To this effect, McDonald (2021) critiques the ‘securitization’ of climate change and argues this framing is counter-productive when it comes to addressing the underlying causes of this global crisis. Governing disaster risk through a security lens may therefore create blind spots, opportunity costs, and conflicts, all of which detract from the absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of societies confronted by emerging and existential hazards. Conversely, securitising this issue may be productive, even necessary, for conveying the relevance and importance of this problem to traditional policing actors who have yet to embrace climate adaptation as a pressing strategic priority.

With these dilemmas in mind, how then might we seek to leverage or reimagine policing mentalities, capabilities, and technologies so that they achieve their conservative functions (i.e. absorption, resistance and stability) whilst simultaneously creating space for more ambitious, transformative agendas to unfold? While abolitionism may appear to offer a pathway towards radically transforming the institution of state-based policing by disrupting its problematic relationship with harmful capitalist systems, revoking the license, or constraining the ability of established policing actors to perform their basic functions without a clearly defined and widely accepted alternative would undermine the absorptive capacity of many societies. The reality is that notwithstanding their diminishing social licence (McLean et al. 2023) and differential and at times harmful impacts on marginalised communities, police in many parts of the world continue to play an important role in governing and delivering security by reproducing ‘general order’ which involves the ‘maintenance of regularity and the protection of persons and livelihood’ (Marenin 1982, p. 382).

In the absence of an obvious alternative, adaptation offers a much-needed bridge between absorption and transformation. Adaptive policing as a progressive as opposed to radical mode of intervention will not solve our climate crisis or guarantee our long-term survival as a species. However, as an element of a complex adaptive governance system, enhancing the adaptive capacity of policing agencies and networks, and aligning their mentalities with an ‘ethos of care’ (Harrington and Shearing 2017), may support the development of more sophisticated approaches to governing vulnerability, buying us additional time, and perhaps even creating a space and appetite for more imaginative and transformative agendas to emerge and gain purchase.

A way forward

As a first step towards initiating this adaptive process, we call upon policing and adaptive governance researchers to draw attention to diverse encounters between policing actors and hazards, disruptions, and complexities attributable to climate change in societies across the globe. Establishing a comparative knowledge base is vital for understanding the existing and emerging capabilities and limitations of different policing models and traditions, along with the factors that seemingly support or inhibit adaptation across different policing landscapes. Documenting and analysing the present and past is necessary for developing more innovative and imaginative adaptive policing trajectories, including those with transformative potential.

The advantage of this case study-based approach is that it supports in-depth, contextually specific explorations of established policing capabilities, mentalities, and practices. In the spirit of critical criminology, it also encourages researchers to consider how these emerging policing landscapes are shaped by, and shape, wider political and economic forces. Empirical research of this nature thus enables researchers to illuminate the strategies that policing actors use to manage emergencies and crises, and how these are shaped by established cultural, institutional, and structural forces. Contextualisation is also vital for disentangling and potentially disrupting these relations of power, thereby identifying, and creating opportunities for adaptive and radical change to be enacted. This approach will further support comparative and collaborative work that reveals different possibilities for governing and delivering security in the face of crises, both within and beyond the constraints of established modern and late modern policing models (see for example Luong et al. 2024). This is vital for ensuring that emergent or imagined models of security governance, whatever we might aspire these to be or entail, are crafted to complement, and enhance the capabilities of wider governance systems and meet the needs of the populations who rely on them. It is also critical for ensuring that any adaptive policing trajectory is responsive to contextually specific understandings of the relationship between the state and society, and socially held beliefs about what policing actors, state-based or otherwise, should or should not be doing in the name of ‘security’, ‘resilience’, and ultimately, ‘survival’.

The downside to this approach, at least from a traditional social scientific perspective, is that the generalisability of the context-specific descriptions, analyses, and recommendations it generates is somewhat limited. In our view, this is inevitable because description and theory-building must precede problem-solving, evaluation, and even normative debates when it comes to understanding and governing new and emerging harm landscapes. It therefore remains unclear to us how our existing paradigms of evidence-based policing might themselves be adapted or transformed to support this project. This is an important matter for future discussion, but as it stands, researchers and practitioners must acknowledge that experiential factors, namely those described by Fleming and Rhodes (2018, p. 3) as ‘occupational culture, institutional memory, local knowledge and craft’, will play a vital role in shaping adaptive policing capabilities and vulnerabilities.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The possibility of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War was arguably governed as a ‘known known’, even if it did not eventuate.