16 chapter 1 aim to challenge the status quo by doing things in a different way than before and by seeking new beneficial opportunities. For example, people can shift their diet to incorporate foods that are better suited for the changing climate in the local area, or set up a relocation plan to adapt to climate change risks. Similarly, people can decide to shift their lifestyle to establish different priorities (e.g., exercise, mental health, time spent with family) in response to a pandemic like COVID-19 (Ogueji, 2022). In this dissertation, we aim examine to what extent higher transilience increases the likelihood that people (intend to) engage in a wide range of individual adaptation actions. We test this proposition both in the context of climate change (Chapter 2) and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 3). Notably, in doing so we examine whether transilience can be a ‘general antecedent’ of adaptation actions (cf. van Valkengoed, 2022), namely a relevant predictor of different types of adaptation behaviours, in the face of different risks and across different contexts. Transilience and Community-Based Adaptation While the importance of studying climate change adaptation at the community level has been acknowledged (McNamara & Buggy, 2017), research has predominantly focused on behaviours at the level of individuals and their households (van Valkengoed & Steg, 2019a, 2019b). In this regard, little is known about what motivates people to engage in community-based adaptation actions, namely actions that help their community as a whole adapt to climate change risks. Like individual adaptation behaviours, these behaviours can be incremental (e.g. buying sandbags together with others to protect the local area from floods) or transformative (e.g., joining a community initiative to reshape the local neighbourhood by replacing concrete with trees and bushes, to protect the community against heatwaves and floods). Therefore, in this dissertation we aim to test whether community-based adaptation, which implies that people act within and in the interest of their community, is more likely to happen when people perceive higher transilience. Importantly, we assume that perceiving transilience at the individual level may not be enough to increase the likelihood that people engage in behaviours to protect their community from climate change risks. Instead, we propose that particularly collective transilience is likely to promote community-based adaptation, as this last comprises more than the individual interests and efforts. Our proposal, besides building on existing literature on what motivates action at the community level (e.g., Thaker et al., 2016), is in line with the compatibility principle (Ajzen, 2020), which states that constructs are more strongly related when they are assessed at the same level of specificity. Again, we examine whether higher collective transilience is related to different types of community-based adaptation across different contexts, thus examining whether collective transilience can also be a ‘general antecedent’ of community-based adaptation (cf. van Valkengoed, 2022).
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