Paper short abstract:

Most interventions by organizations intended to support climate change adaptation ignore people's culture and a refusal to acknowledge their own 'institutional culture'. This paper explains why this leads to significant problems for support to people in the face of climate change and related extreme events.

Paper long abstract:

Organizations that seek to support adaptation to climate change, and/or are engaged in disaster risk reduction, almost entirely ignore two crucial aspects of people's behaviour. First, they do not give enough significance to the fact that many people live in hazardous places because those same places provide their production assets and livelihoods. Second, they do not acknowledge that most people interpret risks through cultural (including religious) understandings that enable them to live with danger by being fatalistic or interpreting disasters as the 'will of god/s'.

This presentation outlines the character of these problems and explains why it is also essential to understand the culture of the organizations that are themselves failing to be 'rational' by assuming that people's behaviour in the face of risk (including climate change) is structured by the same rationality that they assume. It argues for a deeper understanding of the cultures of people in the face of risk, and a change to the institutional behaviours that insist that people fit into the structures of organizations.