ABSTRACT
This comment, made by a scientific advisor to the Welsh Assembly, is a very clear acknowledgement of challenges facing managers having to consider the organisational challenges of climate change risk management alongside existing imperatives including efficiency and transparency. Here our respondent was clear that while formal institutional structures are necessary to give organisations shape and direction, when adaptation is required to protect core functions this is nuanced – potentially championed – by the contingent, shadow world of informal relationships. This chapter presents the viewpoints of actors within two different kinds of organisation who reflect on the interplay of social relations within canonical and shadow systems that characterise adaptive capacity. Communities of practice and networks of looser ties are considered. The aim is not simply to illustrate adaptation as resilience but rather to give some substance to the complexity of social relations that give rise to adaptive capacity originating from within organisations. As noted in Chapter 3, while resilience may be the dominant external outcome of the social agency described within organisations, internal acts that could be classified as transitional and arguably transformational are also observed.
