Adaptive Sustainable Strategies

Conventional development thinking favors a structural approach. It uses aggregates or structures, large-scale trends (macro), and operating units (micro). Dominant thinking tends to simplify reality by using one-size-fits-all models and general laws (universalism) to explain development dilemmas. It relies on linearity criteria to understand social phenomena and often reduces analysis to binary or dichotomous oppositions.

Public policy design that relies on top-down aggregate models turns out to be external instruments that are introduced (from the outside) into people's lives and are re-shaped by them. That is, these instruments are mediated and frequently transformed by actors and social structures. This mediation takes the form of interaction and mutual determination between public policy and stakeholders. Therefore, social actors should not be reduced to general categories (class, age groups, employment status, marital status, etc.). Instead, they are active participants who receive and interpret information. They design strategies in their relationships with local actors and their environment. Local actors adapt their strategies, trajectories, or courses of action to their environment and, at the same time, shape it. This relation of mutual determination constitutes what we call adaptive strategies.

The risk of simplifying reality is twofold. On the one hand, conventional thinking pays little attention to how people live and handle their everyday lives. This simplification underestimates the capacity for agency of social groups. On the other hand, this simplification neglects the process-oriented nature of development. It also ignores that development results from different processes (social, historical, political, institutional, etc.). In that case, policy designers should pay more attention to the multiplicity of actors and interests participating in these processes. This implies studying public policies from the bottom up and from the perspective of the communities that make up and give meaning to what they do and how they do it.

The enactment of these adaptive strategies by social groups is planned, instrumental, and spontaneous. Individuals´ decision-making is also influenced by broader frameworks of meaning and action that explain people's motivations, intentions, and interests. These frames of meaning make adaptive strategies spontaneous, erratic, and often contradictory. Therefore, public policy design should rely on a better understanding of these spontaneous courses of action. It is also essential to understand how people perceive what they do in development policy implementation based on their worldview. We need to comprehend better the links between their worldview and the global phenomena in which adaptive strategies make sense.