Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533

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Global Environmental Change

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha

Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change

adaptation
Siri H. Eriksena,* , Andrea J. Nightingalea,b , Hallie Eakinc
a
Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences, P.O. Box 5003, 1432 Ås, Norway
b
Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Ulls väg 28, P.O. Box 7012, SE-750 07 Uppsala, Sweden
c
School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 875502, Tempe, AZ 85287-5502, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This paper is motivated by a concern that adaptation and vulnerability research suffer from an under-
Received 13 February 2015 theorization of the political mechanisms of social change and the processes that serve to reproduce
Received in revised form 11 September 2015 vulnerability over time and space. We argue that adaptation is a socio-political process that mediates
Accepted 14 September 2015
how individuals and collectives deal with multiple and concurrent environmental and social changes. We
Available online 26 September 2015
propose that applying concepts of subjectivity, knowledges and authority to the analysis of adaptation
focuses attention on this socio-political process. Drawing from vulnerability, adaptation, political ecology
Keywords:
and social theory literatures, we explain how power is reproduced or contested in adaptation practice
Politics
Climate change adaptation
through these three concepts. We assert that climate change adaptation processes have the potential to
Power constitute as well as contest authority, subjectivity and knowledge, thereby opening up or closing down
Authority space for transformational adaptation. We expand on this assertion through four key propositions about
Subjectivity how adaptation processes can be understood and outline an emergent empirical research agenda, which
Knowledges aims to explicitly examine these propositions in specific social and environmental contexts. We describe
how the articles in this special issue are contributing to this nascent research agenda, providing an
empirical basis from which to theorize the politics of adaptation. The final section concludes by
describing the need for a reframing of adaptation policy, practice and analysis to engage with multiple
adaptation knowledges, to question subjectivities inherent in discourses and problem understandings,
and to identify how emancipatory subjectivities – and thus the potential for transformational adaptation
– can be supported.
ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction present conceptualizations of climate change adaptation – justified

Climate change is introducing new risks and increasing
fluctuations in resources across time and space, exacerbating
existing vulnerability (IPCC, 2014). At the same time, the science of
climate change itself influences how we recognise and understand
these changes (Hulme, 2011; Mahony, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2010).
As a result, climate change requires people to adjust (‘adapt’) not
only to new hazards and changing resources, but also to new
regimes of knowledge, as well as to changes in access to and
control over resources. Consequently, there is an increasing debate
over who is considered to have the responsibilities for and abilities
to manage these changes (Bulkeley, 2012; Wolf et al., 2013). While
this debate is encouraging, our paper is motivated by concerns that
* Corresponding author. Fax: +47 64965201.
E-mail addresses: Siri.eriksen@nmbu.no (S.H. Eriksen),
andrea.nightingale@slu.se (A.J. Nightingale), Hallie.eakin@asu.edu (H. Eakin).
in the name of urgency (Forsyth, 2014) – have by-passed critical
analytical lessons learned in relation to other society-environment
issues. At the core of our argument is a conceptualisation of
adaptation as political ‘all the way through’. Rather than politics
being something that affects adaptation outcomes, we offer a
conceptual framework to capture how politics are embedded in
society’s management of change. This framework includes how
individuals, communities, governments and various other organ-
isations interact in adaptation problem framing, the response
options considered and whose interests and voices are able to
influence such debates. We argue that what counts as ‘adaptive’ is
always political and contested. What is seen as positive adaptation
to one group of people may be seen as mal-adaptation to another,
and political processes determine which view is considered more
important at different scales and to different constituencies. We
therefore propose a reframing of adaptation that focuses explicitly
on its political nature, in order to speak directly to how changing
vulnerability patterns intersect with contestations over who is

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.09.014
0959-3780/ ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
524 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
expected to adapt to climate change and who ought to plan and
guide those processes.
Until recently within the climate change literature, adaptation
was largely conceived as a formal policy intervention or a planned
single action that moderates harm or capitalizes upon benefits
(Klein et al., 2007), essentially a linear and implicitly politically
neutral response to actual or expected bio-physical changes (Smit
and Pilifosova, 2001). We build from more recent advances in the
literature addressing the complex social and individual processes
that mediate responses to biophysical change, which draw our
attention to power and politics (Eakin and Lemos, 2006; Eriksen
et al., 2011; Eriksen and Lind, 2009; Manuel-Navarrete, 2010;
O’Brien et al., 2007). This literature makes it clear that too narrow a
focus on policy-making and planning in response to climatic
stressors runs the risk of characterizing adaptation decision-
making processes as exclusively beneficial and primarily technical
or managerial, bounded only by economic and technical capacities
as well as scientific uncertainty.
Closely connected to debates over adaptation responses, the
debate on climate vulnerability is also changing to take more
account of unequal vulnerability to multiple socio-environmental
stressors. Here, the literature addresses the differential impacts of
economic globalisation, conflict and climate change within and
across populations (Eakin, 2005; Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008;
Ziervogel et al., 2006). This more nuanced perspective on
vulnerability is evident, for example, in how the social context
of vulnerability is treated between the fourth and fifth assessment
reports of the IPCC (2007, 2014). Yet, much research on climate
change vulnerability continues to situate vulnerability within
analyses of climate, rather than in societies and political economies.
In doing so, this research masks the social-political causes of risk
and vulnerability (Ribot, 2011), as well as the socio-environmental
processes (Nightingale, 2015) that mediate responses to climate
change and that have been central to how humans have always
responded to environmental variability. We follow Taylor and
others in “emphasiz[ing] the need to conceptualize the relational
dynamics of vulnerability, where the relative security of some
social groups is achieved through the production of insecurity
among others” (2013, p. 318). In short, despite the recent shift away
from linear, biophysical explanations, we see in most scientific
writing and policy responses a reluctance to deal with the politics
of adaptation head-on. This reluctance is underscored by the lack
of a coherent conceptual framework to facilitate addressing this
challenge. The consequence has been a lack of empirical research
focusing explicitly on the social-political domains within which a
fuller understanding of adaptation processes for long-term change
can emerge (Shove, 2010) and a need for more theoretical
innovation to help guide such studies.
To address this challenge, we argue that adaptation should be
conceptualized explicitly as a contested social-political process
that mediates how individuals and collectives deal with multiple
types of simultaneously occurring environmental and social
changes. Our conceptualization builds on perspectives that view
adaptation not as a single decision or measure, but as a social
process wherein social and political relations shape the simulta-
neous management of diverse changes, many of which are not
driven directly or consciously by climate change (Pelling, 2011). As
such, climate change should not be separated from other kinds of
change to which societies respond, nor should adaptation to
uncertainty and change be considered as something new that only
emerged with climate change.
Rather, adaptation must be seen as part of the dynamics of
societies rather than simply being a technical adjustment to
biophysical change by society. This framing recognizes the
important contributions made by social scientists for understand-
ing inequality and social justice issues within adaptation and
transformation debates, much of which has been synthesized in
the recent IPCC report (Adger et al., 2014; Denton et al., 2014;
Mimura et al., 2014; Olsson et al., 2014). In parallel, this literature
reflects increasing recognition that vulnerability cannot be
addressed through adjustments to maintain the current system
(incremental adaptation (Pelling, 2011)) alone, but that there is a
need for adaptation measures to address how vulnerability is
produced. The call for transformational adaptation attempts to
address the roots of vulnerability through action “that changes the
fundamental attributes of a system in response to climate and its
effects” (Agard et al., 2014, p. 1758). We support this call, but argue
additionally that both the production of vulnerability and efforts to
address this vulnerability though adaptation – transformational or
otherwise – must be conceptualized as political and contested,
with outcomes that are not likely to be the same across different
populations.
Issues of power in adaptation processes and empowerment of
vulnerable groups are rising on the agenda (Manuel-Navarrete,
2013; Moser, 2013; Schipper et al., 2014). Nevertheless, there are
few conceptual tools to understand how power operates in the
adaptation process. All adaptation actions will influence social
relations, governance and distribution of resources in any given
population or place. Yet not all these changes are desirable to
everyone. Whether and how adaptation addresses social injustice
and fundamental inequities in resource distribution will always be
disputed, and dependent on specific knowledge, authorities, and
subjectivities. As the literature in Science and Technology studies
(STS) has long argued, science is thoroughly social and how
knowledge is produced and for what purposes is significantly
contextual and contested across different cultural and historical
contexts (Haraway, 1991; Jasanoff, 2005; Longino, 1990). As such,
taking seriously the political nature of adaptation precludes the
development of clear models of what transformational adaptation
looks like since such models are always products of one worldview.
Rather, we argue for more empirical and analytical attention on the
contexts within which authorities, knowledges and subjectivities
come together to shape what counts as adaptation and for whom.
We propose that a reflexive and critical interrogation of the politics
of adaptation itself may provide opportunities for a more
fundamental change in system attributes.
When understood in this sense, we argue for reframing
adaptation to take account of how the exercise of power is always
present within climate change responses. Our concern is to provide
analytical insights into why pathways towards ‘transformational
adaptation’ are so difficult to conceive and promote, and to hold in
view how any transformational adaptation pathway will inevitably
be plagued by contradictory outcomes. To do so, we focus on
authority, knowledges, and the way that individuals and groups are
positioned in relation to adaptation (‘subjectivities’) to capture
multi-scalar politicised relationships that extend between house-
holds to the global scale. We argue that it is these political
dynamics that are most important in shaping adaptation processes
and outcomes and that help us to link climate related adaptation
efforts to broader processes of socio-environmental change.
We use the term politics in its broadest sense, namely, the
processes through which individuals and collectives cooperate and
collude to order and govern everyday affairs. Drawing from social
theory contributions to the understanding of power and politics,
we mobilize authority, knowledges and subjectivities as theoreti-
cal lenses to more precisely conceptualize the effects of power as
they pertain to environmental governance. Authority captures how
the operation of power manifests in the competition for influence
and the ability to exert agendas by one individual or institution
over another within environmental governance and adaptation
processes (Fairhead et al., 2012; Nightingale and Ojha, 2013; Sikor
and Lund, 2009). Struggles for authority are manifest at all scales,
 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
and intertwined in the processes by which different knowledges
are used in adaptation (Beck et al., 2014; Bulkeley, 2012; Hulme,
2011; Jasanoff, 2013; Mahony, 2014), and how environmental
subjectivities emerge in relation to broader discourses of change
and transformation (Nightingale, 2015). ‘Knowledges’ in its plural
form signals how understandings of climate change and adapta-
tion are based in more than just scientific knowledge (Hulme,
2010; Jasanoff, 2013; Mahony, 2014). By exploring the ability of
actors’ to assert one understanding over another (authority), and
evaluating how knowledges combine and influence each other, we
are able to show “on-the-ground” effects of knowledges and
discourses (Goldman, 2011; Taylor, 2013).
Similarly, we use the term subjectivities to link wider societal
processes to individual lives. Subjectivity is a concept used in social
theory to capture how the operation of power, both in terms of
‘power over’ and the ‘power to act’, results in social differentiation
(Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1995). Subjectivities emerge from the
exercise of power through a process of internalizing dominant
cultural codes, discourses and disciplining practices, and the
acceptance of and resistance of these, processes which are always
present even if often unconscious (Butler, 1997; Nightingale and
Ojha, 2013). Subjectivity helps to show how the exercise of power
situates individuals and collectives in relation to each other in
contexts such as environmental governance. Gender, race, class
and other environmental subjectivities (‘pastoralists’, ‘farmers’)
are produced through everyday social and environmental inter-
actions, which serve to simultaneously order the social world, and
to shape individual life chances. Subjectivities are never stable
categories, but rather reflect the dynamic exercise of power, and as
such can have contradictory and unpredictable outcomes (Butler,
1997; Morales and Harris, 2014; Nightingale, 2011). Subjectivity is
thus always ‘Janus faced’: adaptation, for example, can serve to
reproduce subjectivities and inequalities, but if adaptation
involves everyday practices that clash with cultural codes, it can
bring such cultural codes and their forms of symbolic violence into
view. By bringing them into view, the ‘natural order of things’ is
challenged and provides an opportunity for the alteration of
subjectivities (e.g. from ‘poor farmer’ to ‘climate resilient
agricultural innovator’) (Nightingale and Ojha, 2013).
Taken together, authorities, knowledges and subjectivities draw
our attention to the everyday practices within which the exercise
of power is both cemented and transformed. This is crucial in the
context of climate change adaptation if we want to illuminate how
power is embedded within both problem framing and responses.
Thus the papers in this special issue focus on the moments through
which politicisation comes clearly into view in social interactions
and decision-making around climate change adaptation and
analyse how such moments are foundational to shaping outcomes.
Such moments include the formation of policy and plans, the
organization and activities of social movements, everyday live-
lihoods activities and struggles, as well as enrolment in and the
actions associated with formal politics (such as parties, parlia-
mentary negotiations and actions). The case studies show clearly
that the politics of adaptation across scales shape the space for
transformational adaptation in a dynamic manner. First because
knowledge, subjectivity and authority shape what particular
adaptation interests and actions take place. And second, because
the contestations that take place through the adaptation process
themselves alter fundamental attributes of society including
knowledges, subjectivity and authority.
In what follows, we first review other work on climate change
adaptation and how it contributes to our conceptualization of the
politics of adaptation. Section 3 turns to social theory for more
conceptual resources in order to capture how power and politics
permeate efforts to address climate change in the context of on-
going processes of social and ecological transformation. Here we
525
elaborate on how taken together, authority, knowledges and
subjectivity can conceptually anchor a deeper understanding of
how power operates in the politics of adaptation. Section 4
describes four key propositions that emerge from our discussion of
how politics of adaptation operate through authority, knowledges
and subjectivity. The section then outlines a research agenda and
introduces the papers in this special issue. Section 5 concludes by
describing the need to understand how power and politics operate
through authority, knowledges and subjectivity in order to identify
how adaptation practices and processes can challenge, rather than
reaffirm, existing power relations, and hence contribute to
deliberate transformational adaptation.
2. Adaptation as a socio-political process
In this section, we show how the literature on adaptation and
vulnerability has increasingly illustrated the relevance of social
and political processes, and the importance of politics within them,
for adaptation dynamics. Yet, this research continues to suffer from
an under-theorization of the political mechanisms that serve to
reproduce vulnerability over time and space. It is the need to
conceptualize these mechanisms – and the need for further
empirical research that probe the role of power and politics in
adaptation – that motivates our analysis here.
In response to the more managerial or technocratic approaches
to adaptation observed in practice, adaptation scholars are calling
for a greater policy focus to the underlying causes of vulnerability
and risk (Ribot, 2011; SREX, 2012). Some of this work recognizes
the importance of social capital, governance, and adaptation
policies in creating inequality (Pelling and High, 2005). This
apparent agreement can mask very different interpretations of
vulnerability and its causes, and thus what constitutes legitimate
adaptation. As pointed out by O’Brien et al. (2007), vulnerability is
seen by some scholars as an outcome of climate change, albeit
filtered through social factors and institutional responses, whereas
other analyses focus on how social and political processes drive
vulnerability as an inherent state. Similarly, some chapters of the
most recent IPCC (2014) report continue to treat adaptation
primarily as the adoption of specific technologies, programs,
policies or measures to address climate risk, while other chapters
clearly recognize the way that adaptation to climate change is
effected through social and political processes, and some reflect
both perspectives (Adger et al., 2014; Mimura et al., 2014; Noble
et al., 2014; Olsson et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2014).
Given that the IPCC report represents a synthesis of the current
literature, it not surprising that these analytical tensions remain
(Beck et al., 2014; Mahony, 2015). And there continue to be
numerous attempts in adaptation planning and academia to isolate
climate change impacts and adaptation from the “messiness” of
other societal spheres in order to retain conceptual clarity and
analytical purity of the concept (Arndt et al., 2012; Biagini et al.,
2014; Yohe and Schlesinger, 2002). Analytical purity facilities the
use of empirical models that are contingent upon our capacity to
isolate causes and effects, enabling evaluations of the economic
costs and benefits of adaptation, and facilitating the association of
response options with specific environmental signals. However,
such approaches fall short of taking a deep understanding of
vulnerability contexts, its social drivers, and in particular the social
and political-economic production of marginality and associated
risk as a starting point for adaptation efforts (Eriksen et al., 2011;
Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008; Ribot, 2011).
Rather than conceptualizing adaptation as a policy process
independent from broader patterns of social change, therefore, we
conceptualize adaptation as part and parcel of these processes of
change. This means that adaptation needs to be tied to the
everyday livelihood activities and ambitions of individuals and
526 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
groups in society (O’Brien, 2012). It is deeply problematic to
distance adaptation from the drivers of vulnerability, or to see
adaptation as a program or a policy process delinked from how
other aspects of societal change take place. Contested intersec-
tional social relations cannot be reduced to concepts such as ‘social
capital’ (Fine, 2001), nor is it safe to assume that core political
contestations and struggles will be solved through better policies
and ‘good governance’ (Eakin and Lemos, 2006). Perhaps most
fundamentally, the delinking of climate change adaptation from
the political economic processes through which climate change
itself is produced (i.e. carbon emissions) (O’Brien, 2012), is one way
for the majority of the world’s population to comply with, rather
than challenge, a future determined by a high-emitting minority.
By implicitly limiting the concept of adaptation to a rational policy
process, people are presented as ‘recipients of adaptation’, rather
than active agents in shaping their destinies (Eriksen et al., 2015).
Yet any adaptation decision, whether made by an individual
adjusting his or her livelihood strategy, or a policy maker designing
formal adaptation strategies, is the product of prioritizing some
interests over others, privileging and experiencing some biophysi-
cal changes over others, hearing some voices and ignoring others.
These processes of prioritization and exclusion necessarily have
positive and negative effects distributed socially, spatially and
through time.
More socially- and politically-oriented analyses have focused
on global climate change negotiations as well as processes of
national climate change policy formation, including the potential
negative effects of climate change adaptation policies (Arnall et al.,
2014; Bulkeley, 2012; Marino and Ribot, 2012). Recent work on the
possibility of maladaptation is situated within these efforts,
emphasising that adaptation aimed at one group may have
negative effects on other groups as well as over time (Barnett
and O’Neill, 2010; Taylor, 2013). Furthermore, Tanner and Allouche
(2011) call attention to how ideas, power and resources are
conceptualised, negotiated and implemented by different groups,
and in particular how adaptation and mitigation responses are a
direct outcome of knowledges and discourses about climate
change.
There have also been recent challenges to the idea that better
policy-making and more scientific knowledge are needed to
address adaptation. So far, most research has focused on providing
a scientific basis for policy makers to make decisions. This leads to
a need to frame analyses within the boundaries of climate science
and attributing any ecological and social changes directly to
changes in climatic conditions (rather than as part of more
complex socio-environmental change where the attribution of
climate change cannot easily be quantified). The literature on the
politics of climate change, however, questions the credibility,
salience and legitimacy of institutionalized ‘scientific knowledge’
for climate change decision making (Hulme, 2010, 2011). They
rather call for increased inclusion of local knowledge and moving
debates and decision-making about how to address climate change
from the sphere of ‘experts’ into the public sphere (Beck et al.,
2014). There is thus a need for analyses of politics and inequities to
move beyond policy and situate adaptation as part of socio-
political processes involving relations, contestations, negotiations
and cooperation at multiple scales, from the individual to that of
international negotiations.
We therefore argue that an understanding of the social
dynamics of vulnerability is required as a starting point to address
the political nature of climate change. A growing literature
grounded in contextual rather than outcome interpretations of
vulnerability documents how adaptation to multiple processes of
socio-environmental change – which include economic globaliza-
tion and market restructuring, conflict and insecurity, local loss of
resource rights, as well as climate change – shapes lives and daily
decision-making across the globe (Amundsen, 2012; Eakin, 2006;
Eriksen and Selboe, 2012; Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008; Reid and
Vogel, 2006; Scoones et al., 1996; West and Hovelsrud, 2010;
Ziervogel et al., 2006). All these processes are embedded in how
the politics of climate change adaptation play out. A number of case
studies are emerging that clearly show how the range of
adaptation options considered at any moment in time are
inevitably the product of contested decisions regarding invest-
ment, resource allocation and social activities made years, if not
decades earlier (Wise et al., 2014). Actors with significant presence
and clout in public and private spheres may have greater
opportunities to help bias the parameters of decision-making to
their benefit (Ribot, 2010). Public sector interventions in adapta-
tion processes may also serve to reinforce state political machinery
at the expense of vulnerability reduction, as demonstrated by
Nelson and Finan (2009) in the case of drought responses in NE
Brazil. Similarly, dissonance of visions and priorities between
different social groups can result in lost opportunities for action as
well as mis- characterization of the underlying causes of
vulnerability (Eakin and Appendini, 2008).
Together, these and other contributions make the case that
adaptation is a profoundly social process that includes informal
and formal institutions, learning, diverse local values and
negotiation of interests. Clearly there is a need to analyze how
power and politics underpin these processes (Eriksen and Lind,
2009; Eriksen and Selboe, 2015; Naess, 2013; Tschakert et al.,
2013). Nevertheless, the mechanisms through which decisions
arise out of the exercise of power, struggles over whose knowledge
counts, and how some actors are able to exercise more power in
adaptation decision-making than others (i.e. politics), is not well
elaborated within these literatures.
A critical question then is how a better understanding of the
political processes inherent in adaptation can help facilitate
transformational adaptation, or alter the fundamental attributes
and processes in society driving vulnerability (as well as rising
emissions). In particular, the normative goals of transformation we
would put forward must include more sustainable development
pathways in terms of reduced poverty, inequity, and environmen-
tal degradation, recognizing that all of these are negotiated
(political) concepts and processes (Manuel-Navarrete, 2010;
Moser, 2013). Rather than enhancing participation of vulnerable
groups in adaptation processes designed by powerful groups, there
is a need for co-production of these processes by the vulnerable
(Manuel- Navarrete, 2013). In other words, there is a need for
disadvantaged groups to have access to subjectivities that cast
them in active roles rather than as either victims or villains in
responding to environmental change (Hartmann, 2013), as well as
policy and science making forums wherein different knowledges
are contested. It is critical that individuals have control over their
circumstances, through framing ‘adaptation’ as a process that goes
well beyond normal poverty or material notions of basic needs and
social equity, to include people’s diverse values and ambitions
(Barnett, 2013).
In the next section we draw on social theory to gain access to
the mechanisms through which social inequality, decision-making
authority, and knowledge of change are contested and stabilized
over time and space. This kind of conceptualization also reveals the
processes through which different outcomes are possible and how
radical changes like those expected by climate change can become
opportunities to not only expose the workings of power, but also
shape politics in a more emancipatory direction. We conceptualise
policies as one of a diversity of moments of politicisation wherein
authorities, knowledges and subjectivities come together to frame
which actions and policies are developed, how they are framed and
who advocates for them. In what follows we use the concepts of
authority, knowledges and subjectivity as tools for understanding
 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
how adaptation mobilizes and reproduces specific configurations
of power, discourse and understandings of socio-environmental
change, as well as produces uneven outcomes.
3. Conceptualizing power and politics: authority, knowledges
and subjectivity
As we have shown in the above section, scholars contributing to
the adaptation literature have begun thinking about how power
and politics play out in climate change contexts. At the same time,
however, this literature needs to go beyond observations of
inequalities and unevenness in order to probe how climate change
is yet another context for struggles over how values and resources
are governed and accessed across scales (Forsyth, 2010; Mahony,
2014; Taylor, 2013). To date, these insights have only partially been
taken up by climate change adaptation research and policy. We
suggest they need to be foundational. A conceptualization of
adaptation must take account of the normative dilemma: who
decides what trajectories of change are desirable and ‘good’.
Power has been widely conceptualized across the social sciences
with some classifying different types of power, while others focus
more on its effects (Allen, 1999, 2002; Bashevkin, 2009; Dean, 1999;
Rose, 1999 Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). We draw primarily from these
latter conceptualizations of power, which sidestep the thorny
question of what power is, and rather focus on how we see power
in action (Allen, 1999; Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1995; Rose, 1999).
Similarly, we take a broad understanding of politics as the
contestations, collaborations and negotiations through which
collectives govern their everyday affairs (Hansen and Stepputat,
2001; Rose, 1999). Rather than focusing on politics as an abstract
process, or the exclusive domain of formal government and political
parties, we see the exercise of power through authority, knowledges
and subjectivities as the moments wherein politics comes into view.
Here, the exercise of power is inherent to all political processes, but
this does not necessarily imply coercive power. Rather, the exercise
of power is a productive force, one that allows for action and agency
and is integral to all human interactions (Butler, 1997; Foucault,
1991; Nightingale and Ojha, 2013). In any interaction, power can be
enacted as ‘power over’ or ‘empowerment’, in addition to horizontal
or lateral moves (Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992; Nightingale,
2011). We prefer this framing to other more static definitions of
power because it allows us to probe how the exercise of power can
simultaneously have positive and negative effects. When we bring
this conceptualization to climate change adaptation, it also draws
attention to how adaptation processes can support beneficial
livelihood change for some people and at the same time, be
detrimental to others (Taylor, 2013).
The idea that power and politics shape how environmental
change and societies co-emerge is certainly not new. Extending
back at least to the early 1980s, scholars drew from political
economy approaches to probe how environmental development
practices and projects are shaped by politics, both at the stage of
conception and implementation (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987;
Forsyth, 2003; Peet and Watts, 2004). These contributions have
long highlighted the fact that environmental vulnerability is
shaped by intersecting processes of social relations, divisions of
labor, political economies, and environmental conditions (Blaikie
et al., 1994; Emel and Peet, 1989; Watts, 1983), such that
vulnerability emerges from the ability to access resources across
time, space and between different actors, rather than from
absolute quantities or qualities of resources (Sen, 1999; Watts
and Bohle, 1993).
But simply showing that ‘power and politics’ shape resource
access, control and distribution is insufficient for understanding
how to intervene in these dynamics, as adaptation policies and
programs explicitly seek to do. There is a need for better analytical
527
tools to probe how society-climate change dynamics are bound up
in struggles over authority, knowledges and subjectivites across
scales. Importantly, we understand these dynamics to be
thoroughly relational, such that actions and struggles within
one population will necessarily impact upon other places and
populations. This insight is not only relevant for understanding
how populations manage change through daily decisions and
planning or how adaptation programs play out in localities (Taylor,
2013). It also signals the way that struggles over authority,
knowledges and subjectivities are foundational to how the science
of climate change is done (Ford, 2008; Hulme, 2010), which kinds
of resources, populations and regions are targeted for adaptation
efforts as a result, and who is considered knowledgeable and
competent to undertake planned activities. At the same time, it
highlights how these struggles intersect with on-going processes
of adaptation, namely, the continual dynamics of social relations,
practices, knowledges and environments that are integral to all
human societies. In short, we advocate for holding in view the
tensions between new policies and programs that are explicitly
designed to respond to climate change, and on-going processes of
adaptation, which have much wider influence and histories. A
focus on power and politics, more specifically, authorities,
knowledges and subjectivities, is an important step for doing just
that.
The concept of authority in climate change adaptation draws
our attention to formalized institutions and organizations at
different scales wherein legitimacy to make decisions about
environmental governance is claimed, as well as some of the less
formalized contexts where authority over resource governance is
asserted and recognized. Institutions are most often conceptual-
ized as the ‘rules of the game’ or the norms, values and practices
that guide formal and informal organizations (Leach et al., 1999;
Ostrom, 1990). This distinction between rules and norms and
organizations helps to show that a formal governance structure
(i.e. a government office) can change, but the institution can
remain the same (the rules and norms that govern its conduct), or
vice versa.
For our purposes, the institutions and organizations relevant for
climate change adaptation are diverse, incorporating not only
those of formal government (which often include public–private
collaborations and interactions) and formally constituted policy
spheres (e.g. watershed councils, NGO-industry roundtables,
community user-groups), but also other modes of governance
such as traditional authorities, neighborhood coalitions, and social
movements. Power operates within and between these different
formal and informal organizations and institutions, as well as
between actors at different levels and scales (Leach et al., 2010), to
shape who is authorised in what ways to promote adaptation and
mitigation efforts. A focus on the operation of power as manifest in
authority opens up the black box of institutions to reveal the
dynamics between various rules, norms and organisations that are
instrumental to shaping adaptation trajectories. A relational
understanding of authority suggests the need to probe how
struggles over authority in these contexts are deeply entwined in
the management of resources and environments, and ultimately,
adaptive capacity. Using authority, and how it is contested or
reinforced, imposed and accepted by different actors, provides a
tool to understand the mechanisms through which different actors
are able to further their particular interests in adaptation actions,
and how adaptation actions may both reinforce unequal power
relations but in other cases open up space for contesting existing
inequities.
At the global scale, struggles over authority and across different
knowledge communities in relation to climate change have been
taken up by scholars inspired by Science and Technology studies
(STS). This work has probed how the advent of bodies like the
528 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) have helped shape which kinds of knowledges are
considered authoritative and of universal relevance to climate
change responses. As Hulme (2010, p. 561) states, “ . . . the making
of global kinds of knowledge through new institutional arrange-
ments is intimately tied to the political and social ordering that
accompanies that knowledge-making,”. The issue is not so much
whether one kind of science or knowledge is ‘more accurate’ or
‘objective’ for making decisions related to adaptation, but rather,
how knowledges are both a product of, as well as serve to shape,
global politics around climate change. For example, “[f]raming
global climate change as a universal risk that demands collective
action serves to underscore the need for consensus-based
knowledge production and decision support” (Beck et al., 2014,
p. 81). In this way, knowledges and authority are deeply embedded
within each other and in terms of climate change adaptation have
been foundational to who is considered to need adaptation and
who has the knowledge to promote adaptive efforts.
A focus on authority brings clearly into view how knowledges of
climate change are valued differently across cultural, geographic
and analytical scales and that these values are at least in part
embedded in struggles over authority. Conclusions from interna-
tionally sanctioned reports (including the IPCC), for example, are
politically potent because they are used to justify particular types
of adaptation measures, and what knowledge is included or not is
critical for the types of adaptation processes that are supported.
The whole way that climate science is produced is therefore an
arena for contestation (Beck, 2012; Beck et al., 2014; Forsyth, 2014;
Mahony, 2014, 2015). Most of these ‘global’ reports review (mainly)
scientifically produced research, with some recent efforts to
include grey literature (e.g. NGO reports) and local knowledge. This
gives authority to particular kinds of scientists in producing
knowledge about the distribution of vulnerability and adaptation
needs (Beck et al., 2014). Although the IPCC reports are not
supposed to be ‘policy prescriptive’ but rather merely provide a
knowledge base, this stance masks the normative judgments made
when scientists decide which values and indicators to include in
their research, and which research to include in the review and
which to exclude.
The IPCC reports have, for example, been criticized for relying
too much on global models, which do not represent regional and
local changes in climate well (Beck et al., 2014; Hulme, 2010, 2011).
This reflects a general problem that in many regions, few local
studies of regional climate change, vulnerability and poverty exist.
Hence the ‘knowledge base’ becomes dominated by knowledge
produced by northern scientific institutions, whereas the diversity
of local realities and values are poorly represented for many areas,
serving to narrow how problems are formulated and which
solutions are considered. In the present juncture, we would like to
suggest that broadening the debate is absolutely vital (O’Brien
et al., 2015).
Struggles over authority are not contained to contestations over
knowledge, however. Debates on the relationship between land,
property and authority offers conceptual insights that are relevant
for making sense of how authority is bound up in adaptation (Lund,
2008, 2011; Peluso and Lund, 2011; Sikor and Lund, 2009). Within
this debate, not only is authority exerted or claimed, it also needs to
be recognized. Land rights, for example are not simply bestowed.
Rather, the ability to grant land rights is one way actors and
institutions exert their authority, while at the same time, the
acceptance (or denial) of those rights by their beneficiaries and
other parties is a potent way to legitimate (or undermine) those
actors and institutions (Lund, 2008; Peluso and Lund, 2011; Sikor
and Lund, 2009). Within this framing, we again see how authority
is constituted relationally, not only in how institutions and
knowledge claims co-emerge, but also in how knowledges, claims
to govern environments and adaptation efforts are recognized—
whether through violence, compliance, or embracing those claims.
In terms of climate change adaptation, this kind of conceptuali-
zation helps us to focus in on the mediated relationship between
changing resources and politics that underpin the governance of
those changes. Hence, doing an action (such as fencing in a
previously communal waterhole by a farmer, or converting
customary drought grazing areas into private irrigation farming
plots as part of government policy) in the name of adaptation to
drought or climate change is a way to exert authority, and for those
losing land access, accepting those changes legitimizes authority.
Climate change adaptation processes in these ways have the
potential to constitute, but also contest, authority.
Our final analytical category, subjectivities, helps us to connect
the exercise of power to uneven social relations and individual
agency. Rather than focusing on agency per se, conceptualizations
of subjectivity theorize subjects to emerge relationally from the
exercise of power via dominant discourses and practice, and the
internalization, resistance and ultimately re-expression of those
discourses and practices (Butler, 1997; Gibson-Graham, 2002;
Krause and Schramm, 2011). Individuals and groups are subjected
– most often unconsciously or automatically – by cultural codes
and hegemonic practices that serve to shape how they are
identified by society, often manifesting in inequalities based upon
gender, class, race, as well as other categories of social difference
like disability or geographical location (Bondi and Davidson, 2003;
Nightingale, 2011; Nightingale and Ojha, 2013). At the same time,
the process of internalization and resistance of domination is
foundational to how people consciously and unconsciously see
themselves in relation to the world; effectively how subjects ‘push
back’ against the exercise of power (Butler, 1990, 1997). This opens
up the possibility for resistance or reframing of domination; in
short, the power to act, or in other theoretical language, agency.
Note that in our framing, what is called agency vs. structure
(Giddens, 1984) is here conceptualized as one relational process
wherein ‘structure’ is something that is continually (re) produced
through the internalization and re-expression of subjectivity
(known as the ‘ambivalence of the subject’ (Butler, 1997)) and
as such, is dynamic. The acceptance of domination (i.e. caste
hierarchies) is therefore a contradictory process, wherein believing
one is subordinate can be the very basis for exercising power and
resisting domination. Similarly, the conscious rejection of domi-
nation can lead to embracing new, more liberating subjectivities
that allow one to move outside of hierarchical relations (Butler,
1997; Krause and Schramm, 2011; Nightingale, 2011). Subjectivity
therefore shows us very clearly how the exercise of power is not
only repressive, nor is it only hierarchical (domination and
repression) (Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). Rather, subjectivities
allow us to explore the way that social inequality can be a basis for
further disadvantaging individuals and communities, but it can
also serve as a platform from which to resist domination and assert
alternative ways of addressing climate change adaptation.
Analytical attention to subjectivity can therefore offer insights
into the ways that social inequalities are produced and cemented
over time and context. When subjectivity is combined with
authority and knowledges, our conceptualization points research-
ers towards the everyday practices, institutions and political
economic effects wherein contested processes that serve to create
vulnerabilities are produced, as well as the processes that offer
alternative subjectivities and new people and institutions to be
authorized at different scales.
A focus on subjectivity therefore brings into view two crucial
processes within climate change adaptation: how individuals
come to be positioned in relation to adaptation efforts and how
people understand themselves within those processes. Climate
 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
change adaptation policies and programs are evaluating ‘adaptive
capacity’ and reframing entire populations as ‘climate vulnerable’
or ‘climate resilient’. These subjectivities are not simply labels that
help to direct international efforts at supporting adaptation.
Rather, they serve to bring people into relationships with policies,
programs, authorities across scales and each other based upon new
definitions of what capacities they possess and what vulnerabil-
ities they face. Subjectivity also highlights how people internalize
and resist such subjection and its relationship to their actions.
Whether you see yourself as vulnerable, or capable of altering
practices to become less vulnerable, for example, may determine
whether you consciously engage in adaptation. Similarly, the idea
that climate change is affecting our lives may seem disempowering
and resisted if seen as ‘imposed’ by central government or outside
development agencies. This is particularly relevant given the
labeling of groups such as women, indigenous peoples, or
developing countries as ‘vulnerable’ or lacking ‘climate resilience’.
In other words, new kinds of subjectivities are emerging in relation
to climate change and the analytical task is to demonstrate their
contradictory effects in order to more clearly track how power and
politics operate within climate change adaptation.
In short, we argue that the challenge of adaptation demands
conceptualizing power not only as a means of repression or
domination but also, simultaneously, as a source of innovation and
transformation. As people come together over common goals, or
agree to promote a particular development pathway, they
simultaneously serve to authorize certain people to lead and
particular logics to prevail. The operation of power must be seen to
have complex outcomes, ones that serve to reshape how people are
viewed in relation to climate change and how they see themselves.
The competition, collusion and conflict that characterises policy-
making manifests in cementing rationalities and promoting
particular regimes of governance. It is therefore such political
processes and the operation of power within them that are our
main interest in analysing climate change adaptation.
4. Four propositions and an emerging research agenda
Our theorization of the politics of adaptation leads us to the
assertion that climate change adaptation processes have the
potential to constitute as well as contest, authority, subjectivity
and knowledge, thereby opening up or closing down space for
transformational adaptation (Fig. 1). We expand on this assertion
through four key propositions about how adaptation processes can
be understood. Together these propositions and questions form the
basis of a new empirical research agenda, which aims to explicitly
examine these propositions in specific social and environmental
contexts.
Fig. 1. Key interactions framing the politics of adaptation.
529
a All adaptation decisions, processes and interventions are embedded
in arrangements of authority affecting what decisions are taken, by
whom, which interests are furthered in decision-making, and the
outcomes on differential vulnerability.
Whose authority is legitimized through adaptation interven-
tions and actions? How do cross-scalar institutional and social
relations contribute to the legitimization or de-legitimization of
authority, and with what implications for the agency and authority
of others? What constitutes legitimate adaptation in different
contexts and through which actions, institutions and subjectivities
is that legitimacy granted?
 Authority and knowledge in adaptation are dynamic and self-
reinforcing: Authority is legitimized, reinforced, and challenged
through the use of knowledge; knowledge serves as a basis for
challenging or asserting the legitimacy of authority.
In what ways do contestations over knowledge shape how
adaptation is conceived, mobilized and implemented? Whose
knowledge counts in decision-making and whose knowledge is
excluded? What are the processes through which certain types of
knowledge are considered legitimate, authorizing some to take the
lead in adaptation decision-making? What are the mechanisms
through which household practices and adaptation interventions
can lead to recognition of new knowledges? In what ways is
knowledge used to resist authority and alter power relations in
adaptation processes? And how does the interaction of knowledge
and authority help explain the uneven and contested outcomes of
adaptation processes?
 New kinds of subjectivities are emerging in relation to climate
change, with contradictory effects on power and vulnerability.
We propose that for understanding adaptation processes and in
formulating any intervention, one must ask how different groups
are subjected as ‘vulnerable’, ‘resilient’, ‘poor’ or ‘progressive’.
What are the mechanisms (practices, discourses, actions) by which
the subjects of adaptation are defined, and through what
mechanisms can subjectivity in turn provide emancipatory
opportunities? How do adaptation practices and policies either
entrench existing subjectivities or create new subjectivities? How
does this subjection shape who is considered competent to guide
adaptation, what decisions and actions are prioritized in policies,
and how particular adaptation strategies are legitimized for some
populations? To what extent do people consciously accept or resist
such labels and what are the implications of such acceptance–
resistance for perceptions of adaptive capacity, in daily adaptive
practices, and in the potential for collective action in the face of
social and environmental change? How do different groups
conceptualize vulnerability and themselves as vulnerable? How
do they perceive their own self-efficacy and agency? How are these
cognitive attributes associated with actions, outcomes, conflict and
compliance? In what ways are subjectivities mobilized as a
resource for actors at different levels to assert their agendas and
protect their interests in face of social and environmental change?
 Adaptation takes place in contexts of existing, dynamic patterns of
social relations in which subjectivities are reinforced, challenged
and transformed as a means of engaging with, controlling and
innovating in the face of change.
How do historical trajectories in the dynamics of authority,
knowledges, and subjectivity shape processes of contemporary
adaptation and adaptation outcomes? How do existing develop-
ment discourses, agendas and institutions drive adaptation
530 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
processes by legitimizing particular knowledges and subjectivities,
and to what extent can adaptation processes challenge existing
development? To what extent can limitations to collaboration and
conflict in adaptation be explained by the “Janus” faced nature of
subjectivity, through which both oppression and empowerment
can take place within the same dynamic? In what ways do
collaborative and conflictual relations across scales form part of
the contestation of authority and knowledges, and open up space
for transformational adaptation?
The propositions and research questions constitute an
emerging research agenda that the articles in this special issue
begin to take up. The research agenda calls for empirical,
experiential and contextual studies that critically analyse the
politics of adaptation and, crucially, how these politics may open
up or close down spaces for transformational adaptation—or
adaptation that addresses the politically contested root causes of
vulnerability. An integral part of this agenda is to develop the
empirical evidence of how the relationships between subjectiv-
ities, knowledges, and authority in adaptation affect the
distributional implications of adaptation processes. In particular,
this agenda demands explicit attention to and documentation of
conflict, compromise and negotiation as integral manifestations
of the politics of adaptation, and the ultimate implications – both
positive and negative – of these politics for differential
vulnerabilities moving forward.
Delving into the politics of adaptation will not produce
prescriptive guidelines on how to avoid inequitable or unjust
outcomes in adaptation; nor will such research and analysis
provide clear signals on whether or not a population engaged in
adaptation processes will eventually achieve a desired transfor-
mative outcome. The politics of adaptation is necessarily
contextual and, by definition, about contestation, conflict and
negotiation over processes and outcomes. Nevertheless, if those
engaged in adaptation processes can recognize that, and, with the
support of the research community, evaluate how responses to
climate – even those considered to be mere technical adjustments
to changing climatic parameters – will have specific implications
for identities, rights, voice, and power relations, there may be
greater possibilities for constructive outcomes from even the most
contested change processes. As others involved in sustainability
transitions have argued (e.g. Rodela, 2013), opportunities for
critical reflection and processes of social learning may hold the
greatest promise for achieving the promise of transformational
adaptation. This implies broadening the emphasis in adaptation
activities from the practical measurable outcomes of any invest-
ment or intervention to include a focus on the process of decision-
making and implementation, and the complex social contexts in
which adaptations are occurring.
Collectively, the articles help provide empirical evidence as well
as conceptual material to begin to theorize, for example, how
discourse, indigenous and scientific knowledges, institutions, daily
practices and formal politics, serve to frame what adaptation is, its
relationship to mitigation, and the implications of adaptation for
particular places and populations. Climate change policy inter-
venes in people’s everyday lives, where a variety of institutions,
practices and beliefs already exist about how to best manage the
environment. Næss et al. in this issue demonstrate how climate
policy is inherently embedded in on-going struggles for resource
control and management, and how powerful allegiances across
scales among local and international actors can serve to shape both
the discourse of policy and its consequences on the ground.
Through this analysis they explore how multilateral development
agencies’ investments in energy sector development in Kenya
come into conflict with efforts to meet the energy needs of
resource poor communities. Adaptation thus immediately
becomes embedded in existing conflicts among actors about the
meaning of environmental change and who has legitimate claims
in efforts to alter development pathways.
Similarly, Mosberg and Eriksen illustrate how various illicit
household drought strategies in Kenya serve both to entrench
subjectivity and vulnerability, but also form part of how people
contest authority and power relations. The processes driving the
politics of adaptation are contradictory, driven by a malleability of
what practices are considered social acceptable, and the way that
subjectivity and authority can simultaneously be contested and
reinforced through an individual or household engaging in illicit
coping strategies. Statutory and customary law do not necessarily
coincide; in addition, environmental shocks and hardship can
provoke changes in social norms, redefining what is considered
socially acceptable. These politics contribute to explaining why
vulnerability is far from static or linear.
Manuel-Navarrete and Pelling illustrate how the promotion of
certain subjectivities and centralisation of authority form part of
dominant development paths, but when challenged, can open up
space for transformation. They describe politics promoting three
intersecting patterns of socio-ecological change for the case of
Akumal in coastal Mexico; that of development, adaptation and
transformation. The politics of development and adaptation
involved social exclusion of workers in the tourism industry from
accessing coastal resources. Communities of workers in turn
mobilized emancipatory subjectivities to resist resettlement and
exclusion from the tourist resort, contesting existing authority and
establishing their own settlement. Nevertheless, a politics of
adaptation and development contribute to segregation and
inequality that increase socio-ecological vulnerability. In this
contribution, how economically marginalized actors are able to
influence authority through contesting their subjectivities proves
critical to understanding how transformational patterns of socio-
ecological change plays out over time and space.
Nagoda in this issue explains how technocratic understand-
ings of the causes of vulnerability inherent in both development
and climate change adaptation policies in Nepal tend to margin-
alise other knowledges. While local practices and formal policies
in some cases represent opportunities for opening up the spaces
of contestation of subjectivities, knowledge and authority, there
are several examples of policies acting to limit this space,
exacerbating vulnerability instead. Nagoda describes how this
space is shut down by a lack of consideration of differential local
understandings of vulnerability, as well as by adaptation policies
that focus largely on biophysical determinants of adaptation,
ignoring social and political factors and marginalisation processes
driving vulnerability.
Cumulatively, the articles in this issue demonstrate that the
daily adaptation practices among households, communities and
nations, and the power struggles inherent in them, do not occur in
a vacuum. Adaptation at all levels of intervention becomes part and
parcel of on-going efforts to reaffirm or contest authority, claim
access to contested resources and opportunities, leverage identity
and meaning (subjectivities), frame understandings, and assert
knowledge about issues of critical importance for survival. These
articles illustrate that adaptation interventions, policies and
practices often serve to protect current development patterns
and processes. They reproduce particular subjectivities, impeding
the questioning of whether such patterns serve to reinforce the
same politics and power relations that reinforce vulnerability, or if
they can lead to transformation of vulnerability.
Ultimately, the extent to which formal policies, research
practices and community actions can open up, rather than close
down, the space for contestation as adaptation may be a critical
determinant of the transformative potential of adaptation and for
whom. While it may be impossible to identify whether any specific
adaptation process will, over time, provide conditions for
 S.H. Eriksen et al. / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 523–533
transformation, we argue that the analytical lenses of authority,
knowledges and subjectivities can help bring the hidden agendas
and politics inherent in adaptation to light and to bring attention to
the domains wherein open debate is required.
5. Concluding remarks: supporting adaptation
In this paper, we have argued that adaptation needs to be
reframed as a socio-political process, taking place through
struggles over authority, knowledges and subjectivities across
scales by multiple actors. What does such a conceptual under-
standing of the politics of adaptation mean for efforts to support
adaptation processes? Does an understanding of how subjectiv-
ities, knowledges and authority interact bring us closer to
identifying how the ultimate drivers of vulnerability can be
addressed?
The papers in this special issue attempt to address this question
by drawing attention to the underlying social causes of vulnera-
bility that often lie outside the sphere of individual and spatially
oriented responses. These causal factors and contestations of them
– fundamentally of a political nature – are rarely addressed by
adaptation policies. Rather, our perspective illuminates the role of
a program or intervention in affecting adaptation, including how it
creates, supports, or undermines particular subjectivities, knowl-
edges and forms of authority. It helps explain, for example, why
adaptation options are typically conceived of as formal public
sector interventions or programs addressing specific climate risk.
Such adaptations implicitly reinforce the authority of policy-
makers and experts, rather than for example the full range of actors
involved in managing change, including vulnerable populations.
Furthermore, they place responsibility for adaptation on local
adjustments and techno-managerial measures rather than in social
struggles. In the worst case, such efforts can exacerbate
marginalization through coercion, the de-legitimization of local
knowledges, and the subjecting of groups as passive ‘vulnerable
people’ requiring assistance.
Several contributions to this special issue also describe the
everyday practices that bypass, negotiate and change entrenched
inequalities. Together they begin to provide an empirical base for
understanding how to address vulnerability, although there is a
need for further research into these various forms of resistance and
how formal and informal civil society movements are also part of
the politics of adaptation. Our approach thus represents an
important departure from the managerial focus of current
adaptation efforts. The reframing leads to four key propositions:
first, that all adaptation decisions, processes and interventions are
embedded in arrangements of authority; second, authority and
knowledge in adaptation are dynamic and self-reinforcing; third,
that new kinds of subjectivities are emerging in relation to climate
change, with contradictory effects on power and vulnerability; and
fourth, adaptation takes place in contexts of existing, dynamic
patterns of social relations. These propositions form the basis for a
research agenda for understanding adaptation as a socio-political
process.
At core then, we argue that no one actor or process can
determine whether adaptation trajectories are the ‘right ones’ or
not, and whether they will (at last) address the fundamental causes
of vulnerability. It is inevitable that both formal and less structured
adaptation processes will be fraught with inequities in social
relations, struggles over who has the right knowledge, and who is
authorized to govern and guide change. It is impossible to create
spaces for decision-making and action in which such politics are
absent. Instead, the contributions of this special issue underscore
the need for a shift in focus to engage with multiple adaptation
knowledges, to question subjectivities inherent in discourses and
problem understandings, and to identify how emancipatory
531
subjectivities can be supported. It is crucial for all actors –
including academic communities – involved in climate change
adaptation efforts to recognize how power and politics operate in
these spaces to create vulnerability or, alternatively, to foster
emancipatory action. The papers in this sense also illustrate that
adaptation practices and processes can be a source of social
transformation. Rather than reaffirming existing power relations,
adaptation efforts can challenge them. This is particularly the case
where the ‘natural (political) order of things’ does not match
changing livelihood activities, social allegiances and interactions
that emerge as populations respond to social and environmental
challenges. It is in these moments, wherein the influence of
authority, knowledges and subjectivities themselves become
central to debates over how adaptation ought to proceed, that
we see potential for transformational adaptation.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jesse Ribot and Tor Håkon Inderberg for
helpful insights on earlier drafts. Some of the theoretical
development and empirical research reported in this article and
special issue were carried out as part of the Research Council of
Norway funded project “The politics of climate change adaptation:
An Integrative Approach of Development and Climate Change
Interventions in Nepal and Mongolia” (2011–2014) and a British
Academy funded International Partnership and Mobility Award
“Political Violence and Climate Change” (2012–2015). A big thanks
to Marianne Mosberg for helping with the many practicalities
connected to getting this whole special issue together.
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