Title : Institutions and adaptation processes : A social - ecological system approach for the study of adaptation to climate change

As the international community continues to engage in protracted negotiations over how to implement reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the likelihood that society will face disturbances from extreme events and prolonged warming has increased. There is therefore a need to better understand the process by which adaptation occurs and in particular how the social, ecological and institutional attributes of a system affect important choices along a pathway from environmental disturbance to adaptive outcome. This paper therefore links institutional analysis and the related social-ecological systems framework to the literature on adaptation and robustness to develop an evaluative framework for the study of adaptive processes. This framework allows scholars to investigate how government policies and other attributes of the social-ecological environment affect the ability of actors to resolve a series of adaptation problems they face. Prepared for delivery at the Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW5) conference, Indiana University Bloomington, June 18–21, 2014.