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In an urban environment, different types of actors (individuals, households, community groups, institutions, governmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGO), community-based organizations (CBO) and public and private organizations, etc.) play critical roles in enhancing urban resilience to adapt to the impacts of climate change. To identify and prioritize aspects of climate resilience planning, this study aims to examine the potential impacts of climate change on diverse urban systems and evaluate the capacities of various actors to adapt to climatic stress.

This research selects Mongla, a coastal as well as port town in south-western Bangladesh that faces climate risks including frequent cyclones, storm surges and salinity intrusion due to sea-level and temperature rise, as reported in the National Climate Vulnerability Index 2018. This research uses the methodology proposed by ICLEI South Asia’s Climate Resilient Cities Action Plan and accesses different urban actors’ adaptive capacity for contributing to enhancing climate resilience based on three broad characteristics: the capacity to organize and respond, availability of resources and access to information. The cumulative scores of these characteristics aid in determining the climate adaptive capacity of each urban actor.

The identified 53 actors are grouped into four categories: government (local and national); international/local NGOs, CBOs and associations; community representatives and private sectors and groups and individuals. The group of NGOs, CBOs and associations has a higher overall adaptive potential than all other actor groups, according to the study. When it comes to practicing adaptive capacity, government institutions are in the second-highest position. But, the Khulna development authority, the government agency that is in charge of overseeing all forms of urban development, scored poorly on all fragile urban systems. However, the performance of the fourth group of urban actors is very subpar when it comes to adapting to climatic stress, which emphasizes the need for focused interventions.

Variations in adaptive capacities to climate change across different actors are particularly useful for targeting actors with lower levels of climate adaptive capacities in Mongla town.

This paper particularly addresses the research gap in assessing the adapting capacity of urban actors in Mongla port-town. Policymakers and practitioners can create and carry out targeted interventions that address the particular needs and concerns of vulnerable actors by making use of the insights obtained from this kind of study, thereby assisting in the development of climate resilience in any urban area.

This paper aims to present a case study-based approach to identify resource-poor communities with limited abilities to cope with the adverse effects of climate change. The study area is the Nkonkobe Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape which is one of South Africa’s provinces ranked as being extremely vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change because of high incidences of poverty and limited access to public services such as water and education. Although adaptive capacity and vulnerability assessments help to guide policy formulation and implementation by identifying communities with low coping capacities, policy implementers often find it difficult to fully exploit the utility of these assessments because of difficulties in identifying vulnerable communities. The paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a user-friendly, replicable, practically implementable and adaptable methodology that can be used to cost-effectively and timeously identify vulnerable communities with low coping capacities.

A geostatistical approach was used to assess and evaluate adaptive capacities of resource-poor communities in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. The geospatial component of this approach consisted of a multi-step Geographical Information Systems (GIS) based technique that was improvised to map adaptive capacities of different communities. The statistical component used demographic indicators comprising literacy levels, income levels, population age profiles and access to water to run automated summation and ranking of indicator scores in ArcGIS 10.2 to produce maps that show spatial locations of communities with varying levels of adaptive capacities on a scale ranging from low, medium to high.

The analysis identified 14 villages with low adaptive capacities from a total of 180 villages in the Nkonkobe Local Municipality. This finding is important because it suggests that our methodology can be effectively used to objectively identify communities that are vulnerable to climate change.

The paper presents a tool that could be used for targeting assistance to climate change vulnerable communities. The methodology proposed is of general applicability in guiding public policy interventions aimed at reaching, protecting and uplifting socio-economically disadvantaged populations in both rural and urban settings.

The approach’s ability to identify vulnerable communities is useful because it aids the identification of resource-poor communities that deserve priority consideration when planning adaptation action plans to deliver support and assistance to those least capable of effectively coping with the adverse effects of climate change induced vulnerabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the concepts of exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity as a multiple structure of vulnerability in order to distinguish and interpret short-term coping responses and long-term strategic responses to food system vulnerability.

This paper applies an abductive approach for qualitative analysis of data, which were collected through 18 semi-structured interviews among Finnish food system actors.

The findings suggest that coping capacity and adaptive capacity are indeed two different concepts, which both need to be addressed in the examination of food system vulnerability. Public and private food system governance and related decision-making processes seem to focus on building short-term coping capacity rather than strategic adaptive capacity. In fact, conservative and protective policies can be counterproductive in terms of building genuine adaptive capacity in the food system, highlighting institutional and policy failures as limiting adaptive capacity and affecting future vulnerability.

This paper is the first to provide evidence on the multiple structure of food system vulnerability. It simultaneously considers the external aspect (vulnerability drivers) and internal factors, including short term coping capacity and more strategic adaptive capacity, as key determinants of vulnerability.

Emerging in recent years, digital transformation has become an effective approach for firms to remain competitive in the digital economy. Although this trend has received increasing interest in the business world, there remains a lack of empirical research on the organizational capacities that facilitate digital transformation. To fill this research gap, we investigate the relationship between adaptive capacity configuration and the performance of digital transformation.

We use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify the impact of adaptive capacity on the digital transformation performance of 38 firms in the household appliance manufacturing, light manufacturing and clothing manufacturing industries (HAMI, LMI, CMI).

Our analysis reveals a Technology-driven transformation configuration for the HAMI, a Market-driven transformation configuration for the LMI and a Market and Management-driven transformation configuration for the CMI, as well as identifies environment scanning capacity as a common basic adaptive capacity. The first configuration is rooted in the innovation mechanism, and the last two configurations are rooted in the integration mechanism.

Enterprises in different industries with unique technology levels require distinctive capacity configurations to implement digital transformation. Each dimension of adaptive capacity plays a particular role in each industry. Environmental scanning capacity requires firms to be agile in their interactions with the digital world and to collect information about the environment.

This study enriches and expands the dimensions of adaptive capacity, and we provide a perspective for researching the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises through adaptive capability configuration.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how adaptive capacity is accomplished through communication processes and can contribute to enhancing disaster resilience. The authors adopt a structurational “four flows” explanation of communication processes.

The authors observed and analyzed discourse in meetings of a crisis communication network consisting of representatives of municipalities and public authorities involved in crisis communication management during the Västmanland wildfire in Sweden.

Adaptive capacity during the wildfire was principally accomplished through the structurational communication processes or “flows” of self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning. These flows intersected demonstrating how communication accomplishes the development of a responsive affiliation, organizes stabilizing structuring practices, and enables adaptive structuring practices.

The main contribution of this study is a communicative explanation for adaptive capacity, which draws from a structurational model of constitutive communication, and lends further understanding to improvisation during disasters.

The authors discuss the findings in relation to improvisation, suggesting how the findings can inform future coordinated crisis communication for the public and news media. The recommendations address how practitioners might build a responsive affiliation, use minimal structures (e.g. communication practices), and maintain flexibility by introducing group reflexivity behaviors.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of the communicative constitution of adaptive capacity during a disaster.

This study aims to introduce the Adaptive Capacity Wheel (ACW) Framework to assess the adaptive capacity of local institutions to address energy security issues. This study used two comparative cases, representing Indonesia's city level (Palembang) and the province level (South Sumatra Province).

Data used in the analysis were from face-to-face interviews, site observation and document review. This study conducted a set of semi-structured interviews with the key interviewees.

The two government institutions (city and province) report the challenges in dealing with energy security. The results found that the stakeholders at the city level are less adaptive than those at the province level. This challenge is substantially visible regarding variety, resources, room for autonomous change and leadership. On the other hand, South Sumatra Province is quite adaptive in terms of variety, resources and leadership. This study offers a potential adoption of the ACW framework as an analytical instrument to review the adaptive capacity of local institutions in addressing energy security.

Transforming data from the qualitative to the quantitative form can lead to a biased interpretation of data.

This study is the first attempt to explore the adaptive capacity of local institutions to address the energy security agenda through the lens of the ACW framework.

Organizations increasingly operate under volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. Traditional command-and-control leadership can be ineffective in such chaotic environments. The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative model to help leaders and organizations navigate effectively through VUCA environments. By developing three fundamental capacities (absorptive, adaptive and generative), leaders can cultivate organizations capable of continuous synchronization with their fitness landscapes. Central tenets of the framework include diversity, slack, learning, humility, reflection in action and abductive logic.

This framework is designed based on literature insights, conceptual analysis and experts’ judgment. The paper integrates knowledge from a variety of disciplines and interprets them through the lens of complex adaptive systems.

This paper argues for a process centered, contemplative approach to organizational leadership and development. By providing the underlying rationale for the proposed interventions (e.g. Ashby’s law of requisite variety), the paper also reorients busy leaders’ mental models to show why these time investments are worth implementing.

This actionable framework can help leaders and organizations be more effective operating in a VUCA context.

This paper provides a historic context as to why prediction and certainty are favored leadership strategies, why these approaches are no longer suitable and specific steps leaders can take to develop absorptive, adaptive and generative capacities to transform their organizations. Its scholarly contribution is the synthesis of disparate bodies of literature, weaving those multiple academic perspectives into a practical roadmap to enhance organizational leadership.

This article focusses on the hybrid strategy, a simultaneous combination of cost leadership and differentiation strategy. The study aims to examine the impact of hybrid strategy on firm performance through its anticipated positive effects on process and product innovation. In addition, we study the moderating role of adaptive capacity in the direct relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation.

Structural equation modelling was used to analyse 1,842 Spanish firms with fewer than 250 employees. We randomly selected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Spain from the Spanish Central Business Directory (2021) database. The overall sample design was based on stratified sampling.

We found that hybrid strategy is positively related to firm performance and to process and product innovation. Additionally, in firms implementing hybrid strategies, process innovation fostered firm performance. Finally, adaptive capacity strengthened the relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation. This sheds light on how and when hybrid strategy is most effective in fostering SME performance.

We highlight that SMEs need to establish strategies that use diverse resources and capabilities and not just generate competitive advantage using one strategy (cost leadership or differentiation strategy). This requires an agile and flexible systems and structures.

Our research provides novel results by proposing the adoption of hybrid strategies instead of pure strategies (cost leadership and differentiation strategy) as a way for SMEs to survive during crises. Unlike “stuck in the middle” strategies, our study demonstrates the importance of hybrid strategies in a comprehensive model that links them to innovation and firm performance, with adaptive capacity being a determining factor.

This paper aims to examine how the efficacy of organizational routines varies and the mechanism through which organizational routines improve firm performance.

A theoretical model is proposed and tested using data from 53 interviews with financial services experts and 291 survey responses from financial advisors.

Operational and adaptive routines work through absorptive capacity to positively contribute to firm performance. The positive effects of adaptive routines are magnified under market governance.

The examination of organizational routines is focused on routines at the firm level. Therefore, higher corporate-level routines were not measured. Response rate for the survey is a possible concern, so future research will benefit from increasing the response rate from the focal population.

This study benefits firms facing the dual role of customization and discipline in working with clients toward service delivery. The findings suggest that firms should develop both operational and adaptive routines, particularly when operating under market governance.

This study identified two categories of routines (operational and adaptive) and the circumstances in which the causal link between routines and performance varies. This study examined the potential moderating influence of a governance mode (market vs hierarchy). Absorptive capacity was identified as a mediator between the use of routines and firm performance.

The main components of resiliency, including resilience capacities, resilience activities and resilience measures, are identified, extracted and redefined by designing their ontologies. The integrated model is developed by adapting the PDCA (plan, do, check and act) model to resilience management and implementing the developed concepts in the model.

This study uses systems theory to define the main concepts discussed in the literature on resilience. This study then uses systems engineering theory and a resource-based view of the firm to develop an integrated framework to demonstrate how a resilient firm operates.

The revised terminologies and the integrated model address the current theoretical issues in the literature, and they also provide a reference model for practical implementation of resilience management at the firm level. Also, the integrated model addresses the role of innovation in resilience management.

The study examines the concept of resilience form a quality perspective and also examines how resilience and innovation are related.