The impacts expected from climate change will be so pervasive, that they will require stepping up adaptation efforts significantly, in many respects requiring fundamental transformations in the way societies manage their risks1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Cities, in particular, are faced with high adaptation challenges given that they are often at the frontline of climate hazard exposure8 whilst being characterized by high path-dependency, making transformative adaptation difficult and socially contested3. Meeting the stark adaptation challenges therefore will require collective efforts from different actors of society (state, citizens, civil society, private sector etc.), ideally with a shared understanding on common adaptation goals and clear distribution of tasks and responsibilities9,10,11,12,13. In reality, however, multi-actor constellations are often characterized by conflicting viewpoints on what actors expect from other actors or roles and responsibilities that actor groups ascribe to other actor groups. Related rifts and ambiguities have been identified as significant barrier in adaptation governance14. It is therefore important, first, to lay open and make explicit the often tacit or implicit viewpoints different actors have on their own as well as others’ roles and responsibilities regarding climate change adaptation, second, to assess how actors in cities and other social contexts negotiate potentially diverging viewpoints and, third, to examine whether and how they settle at an arrangement which helps to moderate unresolvable gaps in expectations and ideally arrive at a shared vision on how responsibilities for adaptation should be distributed15,16,17,18,19,20,21. However, this understanding is largely lacking to date, especially in urban settings where diverse social groups and their worldviews clash.
Previous literature has made important contributions to assess how adaptation goals as well as roles and responsibilities for adaptation are being negotiated—which forms the core of adaptation governance22. The notion of ‘social contracts’ has in this context been suggested in the literature, arguing that such a lens can guide future research to explicate the complex politics of adaptation23. Yet, only a limited number of studies on adaptation and related fields of sustainability, resilience or disaster risk management have used the term social contract9,13,17,21,24,25,26, and if so mostly in a loose and rather inexplicit or little conceptualized way. Most literature engages with topics around roles and responsibility for adaptation without explicitly referring to the notion of social contracts10,14,15,16,18. Also the latest IPCC assessment report, which is based on the available literature, does not explicitly assess social contracts for adaptation22. This shows that the concept has so far gained little traction, despite the presumed gains that it would hold for knowledge generation and decision support. Our study responds to the call for using social contracts as a stronger analytical lens23 and develop an approach to empirically assess social contracts for adaptation.
Building on literature on adaptation goals, risk governance and responsibility for adaptation9,10,11,12,13, we define a social contract for climate change adaptation as a collective arrangement between different actors of a society on the overall vision and goals as well as the mutual distribution of roles and responsibilities to achieve those goals. In other words, a social contract describes the collective arrangement of what a society wants and how it gets there. We conceptualize social contracts to be of two types (Fig. 1). Type 1 describes a social contract which exists where actors’ visions and perceptions on mutual roles and responsibilities do not align but where actors seek a social contract to precisely mediate these differences. Type 2 describes a social contract in a situation in which actors’ visions and perceptions on mutual roles and responsibilities align and actors seek a social contract to explicate and formalize this agreement.
Within each of these types (1 and 2), social contracts for adaptation can have three dimensions—imagined (ISC), practiced (PSC) and legal-institutional (LSC) (see Supplementary Table 1 for a detailed description)23. The ISC describes actors’ envisioned goals and viewpoints on the distribution of roles and responsibilities. The PSC describes the ‘real-life’ goals and observable (de facto) distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation between actors. The LSC describes the formally defined goals and visions and legally encoded (de jure) distribution of roles and responsibilities for adaptation between actors.
Our center stage for the empirical analysis of this paper is on understanding the imagined social contracts (see Supplementary Table 2 for detailed overview) and their relations to the practiced and legal social contracts. The imagined social contracts do not only result from the practiced and legal dimensions but also influence them. Hence, on the way towards encoding and practicing new social contracts, the most immediate need is a better understanding of the potentially diverging ways in which different actors envision new roles and responsibilities for other actors and themselves, i.e. which ISCs they have and wish for.
There may be gaps and contestations between the three dimensions of social contracts—for eg. rifts between the de facto, observable distribution of roles and responsibilities (practiced) and the de jure stipulations on formally defined roles and responsibilities (legal). Gaps could also exist within one dimension, e.g., when different actors have different imagined social contracts in mind regarding the distribution of roles and responsibilities. While it might not be possible to fully resolve these gaps and contestations, we suggest that engaging with these differences to at least identify them and become aware of them would allow actors to form a type 1 social contract to mediate the differences and deal with the gaps (which might still remain). Laying open these gaps and finding a way to deal with them would then ideally inform the process of actors aligning the gaps and potentially closing them with the objective of shaping a type 2 social contract.
Against this background, this paper aims to contribute to empirical knowledge on actors’ perceived roles and responsibilities, the potential gaps and contestations between them and the ways in which they are currently being negotiated. By doing so, the paper aims to inform the discussion and formation of at least type 1 and ideally type 2 social contracts on climate change adaptation in cities and beyond.
The need for explicit social contracts for adaptation is most starkly illustrated in cities, proving a valuable and apt unit of analysis. Different viewpoints on adaptation goals and priorities often clash in cities, as it is there that very heterogeneous social groups – characterized by socio-cultural diversity, competing economic and political priorities, asymmetric power relations, different levels of risk tolerance and adaptive capacities—are coming together27. These gaps and contestations may arise in view of addressing pertinent questions on political feasibility, power dynamics and trade-offs involved, such as whose priorities get embedded in adaptation pathways, who decides whose futures are protected and how costs are distributed, which spatio-temporal trade-offs will need to be made etc28.
We use the case study of flood risk management in the coastal megacity of Mumbai to assess the negotiation of social contracts for adaptation. Mumbai is the seventh largest metropolitan city globally and ranks among the top 10 coastal megacities at risk to coastal flooding and climate change impacts29,30 and hence is characterized by some of the highest adaptation pressure one can find31,32,33,34,35. While the city witnessed its most catastrophic flood event in 2005, when one-third of its annual rainfall fell in 24 hours resulting in the death of 1493 people and estimated losses of USD 1.7 billion36,37, heavy rainfall and flooding are almost an annual phenomenon during the monsoon season.
The current social contract for flood risk management in Mumbai is contested and riven between the practiced and legal social contract. Mumbai is confronted with stark inequality—being home to a powerful urban elite while 42% of the city’s population lives in informal settlements. The latter are at high-risk to flooding. Informal settlers are often being forced to live in environmentally risk prone areas, are socially excluded from civic services and poorer38, yet are often seen as illegal encroachments39. According to core national legislation40, disaster management responsibilities are entrusted to the state. Previous studies point out two major shortcomings in the legislation: one, the silence of the Act on state responsibility towards those impacted by disasters41 and two, the de facto implication of the Act on ‘active and willing support and cooperation of the local community’ in disaster management42. While the local municipal authority is entrusted with emergency response function, the national guidelines on urban flood management (UFM) foresee the role of citizens as first responders, even before state machinery steps in43.
The UFM guidelines recognize that the role of civil society has shifted from being “mere relief organizations to focusing on rehabilitation, reconstruction and mitigation” (p.101). Civil society is further explicitly expected to play a role in reducing socio-economic vulnerability of the poor43. Previous studies have emphasized the de facto role of civil society organizations in coping with flooding in Mumbai44,45. However, against the context of India’s economic liberalization which led to increased social and economic marginalization in major Indian cities, including Mumbai, it is important to note the dominant discourse on ‘civil society’ by urban elites which supports exclusionary restructuring policies against the poor39. A recent example of elite capture is seen in the contestations around the highly controversial Coastal Road infrastructure project which is perceived to serve the elite and has prevailed despite protests against it due to its adverse impacts on the sensitive coastline, livelihoods of fishing communities and being labeled maladaptive46.
Hence, there is an urgent need to capture the imagined, diverging viewpoints of different actors against this contested background. Furthermore, despite the freedom of speech being a constitutional right in India47, declining press freedom has been a concern raised in national and international media citing corporatisation in ownership, political control, safety of journalists and absence of civil society demands as the main reasons48,49. Therefore, in this analysis we explore social listening on Twitter, as it forms an increasingly important marketplace to capture different opinions and voices. However, in the context of debates on flood risk in Mumbai, elite actors potentially play a significant role due to favorable factors such as digital access and literacy.
In the age of digitalization and big data, social media, in terms of its volume, scale and speed offers many opportunities for urban sustainability research as well as urban planning and decision-making50. A wide range of quantitative (descriptive statistics such as correlation, regression, cluster analysis etc.) and qualitative (content analysis, social network analysis, thematic analysis etc.) research methods can be applied to different types of big data including Twitter51,52,53,54. Examples of studies using geotagged Twitter data, or sentiment analyses in urban, sustainability and adaptation research is manifold51,55,56,57,58.
Social media offer an important arena to inductively capture and assess the exchange of opinions and negotiations of roles and responsibilities of different actors such as public sector, citizens, civil society and private sector, including nuanced sentiments such as frustrations, hopes etc. Adopting a grounded theory approach59, we combine the inductive exploration of data to capture the dominant debate on Twitter with a deductive application of a social contract theoretical lens. For this article, we developed and utilized the approach of social listening (also called social media analytics)60, defined as an “active process of attending to, observing, interpreting, and responding to a variety of stimuli through mediated, electronic, and social channels”61. Hence, the analysis strikes a balance in combining the potential of big data with context-specific insights to capture “contextual complexity” in adaptation research—as called for by Ford et al.62. Fig. 2 summarizes our workflow, a detailed methodology description is provided in the Methods section.