132 chapter 5 we should minimise the serious and unprecedented threat posed by contemporary adversities (Lagadec & Topper, 2012). Rather, our findings challenge the dominant perspectives on human adaptation to adversities, which tend to focus on finding ways to either maintain/recover what we currently have (see Luceño-Moreno et al., 2020) and/or to minimise the negative consequences that adversities have on people (Fritze et al., 2008; Manning & Clayton, 2018; Doherty, 2018). Transilience broadens and complements these perspectives on human adaptation, by expanding the concept of adaptation beyond preserving the status quo, and by highlighting the potential for finding new opportunities and beneficial change amidst the adverse events that people encounter. As such, this PhD dissertation suggests that human (perceived) capacity to adapt to adversities is in line with a prominent definition of adaptation, namely “moderating or avoiding harm and finding new opportunities” (IPCC, 2014b). Higher Transilience Promotes Adaptation Actions, but Not in All Contexts Transilience Predicts Individual Adaptation Actions, if People have some Freedom to Act We expected that the more strongly people perceive they can persist, adapt flexibly and positively transform in the face of an adversity, the more likely they are to engage in a wide range of actions to adapt to the threats posed by such adversity. Our findings generally show that higher transilience indeed promotes different types of adaptation behaviours, in the face of different risks and across different contexts (i.e., it is a ‘general antecedent’ of adaptation actions; cf. van Valkengoed, 2022). However, our findings also suggest that transilience may not predict adaptive actions when people’s freedom to act is seriously restricted. In Chapter 2 we examined the relationship between transilience and a wide array of adaptation actions in the context of climate change risks. As expected, the results across four studies conducted in different countries (i.e., the US, The Netherlands and the UK) showed that higher transilience in the face of climate change risks increases the likelihood that people engage in various adaptation behaviours, including incremental actions (i.e., aiming to preserve the status quo), transformative actions (i.e., aiming to challenge the status quo and create new opportunities; Wilson et al., 2020), individual actions (i.e., aiming to protect individuals and their household) and collective actions (i.e., aiming to work with and for others to protect the local community). We also found that higher transilience was associated with more support for adaptation policies (both incremental and transformative) and more political collective action (e.g., protesting to demand more adaptive actions and policies; van Zomeren & Iyer, 2009), although this last relationship was not statistically significant in some studies. Thus, it seems that transilience can promote a wide range of adaptation actions across different contexts in which people face various types of climate change risks. Yet, individual transilience may not always promote collective action aimed to urge others beyond oneself to act.
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