The prospect of the adverse effects that global climate change will have on human societies
opened up a discourse about the way adaptation should be managed. In order to finance
adaptation measures in the most severe affected countries the parties of the Kyoto Protocol
established the Adaptation Fund in 2007. In view of the limited resources that are available
for adaptation scales for the prioritization of countries that are based on their suspected
vulnerability have been developed in literature. But so far indicators of vulnerability
reflect only the general indicators of human development and therefore fail to capture the
complex structures of vulnerability. In order to capture the mentioned complexity in a more
satisfactory way this book highlights the theory of collective learning. The collective
learning approach assumes that vulnerability can be significantly decreased when governance
systems adapt to external changes through collective learning processes. This study connects to
this notion and therefore it assesses the influence of collective learning processes on the
vulnerability of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani society towards flood hazards. This determinant
of vulnerability is used to capture the matter s complexity.
