M1 Thompson—Ethical adaptation to climate change 14 Human Values and Institutional Responses to Climate Change Kenneth Shockley Values and Institutions in a Time of Climate Change When addressing problems of the scale of those associated with climate change, it may seem that we need to design institutions to help us handle those problems. We need to develop political bodies and social regimes capable of handling what it might seem individual, uncoordi- nated persons are incapable of handling on their own (Goodin 1992, 1996a). I might personally desire the world to adopt a decarbonized economy, but unless the institutions supporting the market act appro- priately, the actions I take in support of that desire may seem impotent. Institutions, particularly dynamic institutions, seem crucial for adapting to our rapidly changing environment. However, even apart from the worrying sense of personal impotence that may seem to underlie this reliance on institutions, such reliance also disturbingly conceives of insti- tutions as entities that act on our behalf. Not only does there seem to be something pernicious or even vicious in offloading our responsibility for resolving the problems we have caused (Thompson, chapter 10, this volume), we might also worry whether institutions are the sort of things that are capable of acting at all. In this chapter, I will explore the problems associated with designing institutions as collective agents, and point to a more fruitful way of thinking about institutions. I will argue that due to competing pressures on the way we cannot help but design our institutions, they cannot be the agents of change and adaptation we might well wish they could be in light of our present environmental concerns. In what follows, we shall see that the very reasons that press us toward institutional responses to policy formation and evaluation indi- cate the weaknesses and limitations of the institutional approach. I shall 9074_014.indd 281 10/20/2011 9:10:27 PM