Valentina Lozano Nasi

134 chapter 5 for climate change adaptation in The Netherlands (e.g., interest to join the initiative). The results showed that both individual and collective transilience were positively related to individual as well as community-based adaptation intentions. However, when both were considered, collective transilience was the sole significant predictor of all individual and community-based adaptation actions. This suggests that perceiving one’s community to be transilient may be particularly powerful to encourage a wide range of adaptation actions. All in all, the findings presented in this PhD dissertation indicate that when people strongly perceive that they, as individuals and as a community, can be transilient in the face of an adversity, they are more likely to engage to take concrete actions to adapt to that adversity. Notably, we studied a wide array of behaviours, aiming to adapt to different adversities (i.e., climate change and COVID-19), at different levels (i.e., individual and collective), including incremental and transformative actions, as well as support for policies. Hence, we provide substantial evidence that when transilience is high, people are generally more likely to take different actions to adapt to an adversity, across different contexts and risks and at different levels. At the same time, our findings suggest that contextual factors may moderate, and even hinder, the extent to which transilience can promote adaptation actions. Specifically, our findings suggest that transilience may not promote adaptation actions in a context that severely limits people’s freedom of choice (see Chapter 3, Study 1). This finding is in line with the A-B-C model (Guagnano et al., 1995; Stern, 2000), which suggests that the relationship between psychological factors and behaviour depends on the level of contextual constraints; according to the model, psychological factors are less predictive of behaviour when contextual constraints are high (in which case people cannot act in line with their motivations and beliefs) or when contextual constraints are very low (in which case everyone would engage in the behaviour anyway). Thus, while showing that transilience may be a ‘general antecedent’ of adaptation behaviours, this PhD dissertation also highlights a potential boundary condition, notably the level of restrictiveness of the context. In this regard, our findings suggest that the basic principle behind the A-B-C model may apply to transilience as well. More research is necessary to better understand the influence of contextual factors on the association between perceived transilience and adaptation actions. This PhD dissertation also highlights the importance of understanding how to motivate people to engage in adaptation actions specifically for the sake of protecting people’s own communities from the threat of an adversity, as people do not seem likely to engage in such community-based adaptation actions (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, our research suggests that perceiving transilience at the collective level may hold

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