The role of institutions in the transformation of coping capacity to sustainable adaptive capacity

How current coping capacity could be transformed into longer term adaptive capacity is a crucial question for those involved in adaptation planning, especially to enhance sustainability. To shed light on this question, this manuscript will review how coping capacity and adaptive capacity have been conceptualised in resilience and vulnerability approaches to climate change adaptation. The four key challenges to understand the transformation of coping to adaptive capacity include (1) the concealed nature of adaptive capacity; (2) the temporal trade-offs between coping and adaptive capacity; (3) the limited focus to date on rural communities, and; (4) the lack of empirical evidence. The manuscript suggests that institutions play a key role in mediating the transformation of coping capacity into adaptive capacity and that its role can be best researched by combining vulnerability and resilience approaches to climate change adaptation. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.