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Paper short abstract

This presentation offers critical reflection from a practitioner perspective on the challenges and opportunities of assessing differential adaptive capacity to respond to natural hazards and climate change. It discusses the potentials of thinking with, rather than controlling, unruly dynamics.

Paper long abstract

Planners are increasingly concerned with mitigating multi-hazard risks, including cascading and compounding climate risks. Simultaneously, development scholars have critiqued market-based logics of transition and clarified the necessity of assessment frameworks capable of comprehending transformative action within and despite uncertainty. In this presentation I attempt to report back into conversation the practical considerations of taking these advancements seriously and offer the Oregon natural hazard risk assessment as case study for analysis and critique. The science, and scholarship, is clear: mitigation and adaptation alone are insufficient amidst new ecological extremes, warranting research capable of staying in conversation with the highly uncertain, even unruly, dynamics of climate and social transformation. However, the enduring demarcation between planning spheres and lineage of prediction and control within planning practice spotlights the urgency of risk assessment methodologies capable of partnering with unruliness rather than attempting to isolate and control it. The case study risk assessment tool is a bold, hands-on attempt to bridge theory and practice amidst and despite uncertain regulatory landscapes. The risk assessment identifies and ranks choice areas for mitigation investment, based on a preference ranking model that evaluates community capacity to adapt and and respond to vulnerabilities. In this presentation, I explore unruly dynamics within the practice of planning towards transformation, report back into conversation the challenges and opportunities of doing so, and engage unruliness within climate transformations literature towards a reimagination and reclamation of possible futures.