ABSTRACT
Societies are continuously evolving through technological and socio-economic changes. Some of these changes are planned or at least anticipated within the broader goals of development aid (Soubbotina and Sheram 2000). Local, national and international authorities strive to foster increased wellbeing in vulnerable households through planned interventions, such as job creation, subsidies and grants, although they do not always succeed in meeting their targeted aims. These interventions unfold in a continuously fluctuating context, together with large-scale globalization trends, such as urbanization, institutional and societal change and the spread of information and communication technology (ICT). All these phenomena, planned as well as unplanned, influence individuals, households and communities through a complex chain of events in contextualized environments (see e.g. Eriksen et al. 2011). Moreover, such changes shape and form the vulnerability of people and places, as well as their ability to develop effective adaptive strategies in response to these changes. To our knowledge, few scholars have scrutinized the potential opportunities for climate change adaptation arising from the unplanned impacts of changing socio-economic processes and major globalization trends, like ICT.
