Triggering transformative change: a development path approach to climate change response in communities

While climate change action plans are becoming more common, it is still unclear whether communities have the capacity, tools, and targets in place to trigger the transformative levels of change required to build fundamentally low-carbon, resilient, healthy communities. Evidence increasingly supports the finding that this transformation is not triggered by climate policy alone, but rather is shaped by a broad array of decisions and practices that are rooted in underlying patterns of development. Even so, these findings have rarely penetrated the domain of practice, which often remains squarely focused on a relatively narrow set of climate-specific policies. This article builds a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of community-level development path transformations that may both dramatically reduce GHG emissions and significantly enhance community resilience. This framework illuminates eight critical enablers of innovation on climate change, each of which is illustrated by compelling examples of community-level experimentation on climate change across the province of British Columbia, Canada. It is concluded that community-based climate (or sustainability) policy might be more likely to trigger development path shifts if it employs a longer time horizon, recognition of adaptability and feedbacks, integrated decision making, and systems thinking. Policy relevance: This article deepens the understanding of the underlying drivers of both GHG emissions and vulnerability to climate change impacts. A development path framing of climate change responses suggests that highly nonlinear opportunities may emerge to push drivers of emissions or vulnerability over a tipping point and trigger a shift that cascades beyond the community in which the initial action took place. The findings highlight the need for policy approaches that use longer time horizons, systems thinking, adaptive management, and integrated decision making in community planning.