ABSTRACT
This chapter examines more closely the framing and assessment of adaptation problems through the risk-based decision-making methods that are commonly used during the development of policy evidence. In particular, this chapter explores the propensity for processes of politicisation and scientisation that were alluded to in previous chapters. As discussed in Chapter 6, policy players’ views of the adaptation policy process suggest that the importance of congruent norms and values gives primacy to legitimacy, over credibility and salience, as the principal determinant of useful, usable evidence for adaptation. Yet legitimacy may be the most dicult attribute to attain in such a polarised policy arena as for climate change, due to the political and economic contingencies associated with adaptation problems and the technical limitations of the evidence available to understand them. Although the contingent nature of adaptation problems and evidence does not necessarily result in the deliberate politicisation of adaptation evidence, under a linear-technocratic model such deliberate covert expression of values and priorities is certainly possible and strongly indicated by the cases examined here.
