Harnessing multiple domains of adaptive capacity: insights from the COVID-19 pandemic
Sutcliffe, Sarah, Lau, Jacqueline, Barnes, Michele, Muly, Innocent, Wanyonyi, Stephen, Mbaru, Emmanuel, Muthiga, Nyawira, and Cinner, Joshua (2025) Harnessing multiple domains of adaptive capacity: insights from the COVID-19 pandemic. Regional Environmental Change, 25 (3). 88.
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Abstract
The global community has been faced with multiple shocks in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing climate-driven environmental changes. Whether and how people can respond to such shocks depends on multiple factors, collectively referred to as adaptive capacity. Here, we explore how people in five coastal Kenyan communities drew on multiple domains of adaptive capacity to respond to the food security, livelihood, and well-being impacts of COVID-19. We undertook qualitative interviews across three time periods through the first year of the pandemic. We analysed them using a combined deductive and inductive coding strategy based on a recently developed theoretical framework outlining six “domains” of adaptive capacity: assets, flexibility, social organisation, socio-cognitive constructs, learning, and agency. We found that people responded to the impacts of COVID-19 across a continuum from temporary coping strategies to more substantial adaptations and transformations. We not only found that people drew from all six domains of adaptive capacity but identified multiple interdependencies between these domains which shaped how they influenced responses. For example, people’s social networks (part of the organisation domain) played an important role in facilitating their access to assets and learning opportunities, and influenced their socio-cognitive constructs, which in turn influenced the adaptive actions they could take. Our findings suggest that policies and interventions to build adaptive capacity and resilience would benefit from a multi-dimensional approach that accounts for interactions between domains of adaptive capacity.
| Item ID: | 87820 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1436-378X |
| Keywords: | Adaptation, Adaptive capacity, Coping strategies, Kenya, Shocks, Small-scale fisheries, Transformation |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. |
| Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC) |
| Projects and Grants: | ARC CE140100020, ARC FT160100047 |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Feb 2026 06:42 |
| FoR Codes: | 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4410 Sociology > 441002 Environmental sociology @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1899 Other environmental management > 189999 Other environmental management not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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