The Discursive Politics of Adaptation to Climate Change

Abstract

Adaptation to climate change is a policy objective of rapidly growing importance for development programming across the Global South. This article offers an interrogation of the discursive politics surrounding the term based on insights from post-colonial theory. By employing a theoretical framework rooted in the concepts of imaginative geographies and discursive violence, this contribution seeks to deconstruct how adaptation is being imagined and promoted by development actors in a Global South context. The underlying study adopts a multi-sited, institutional ethnography to critically analyze an adaptation project in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) implemented jointly by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the national government. The article presents evidence for how agents of development (re)produce an imaginative geography of the country's vulnerability and engage in a discursive violence that renders project beneficiaries vulnerable on the one hand, and seeks to transform them into model adaptation subjects, on the other. It discusses how local residents have been effectively excluded from the project based on their perceived vulnerabilities, and points to critical political theory and "imaginative counter-geographies" as ways in which the disempowering representations of the Global South as vulnerable and the discursive violence committed against its residents can be counteracted.

Sustainability Science: Toward a Synthesis

“…A growing number of case studies, however, convincingly demonstrate how interventions to control short-term variability and associated risks arising from nature-society interactions can initiate adaptation pathways that systematically reduce adaptive capacity over longer periods and larger areas (e.g., 177). In particular, the discourse of climate change adaptation-especially in the context of development and developing countries-can reinforce existing vulnerabilities and power structures (178). Sustainability science should continue to broaden its perspective beyond short-term risk reduction to develop a capacity for guiding the risk (re)distribution and trade-offs that adaptation pathways seem inevitably to entail.…”

Geographies of slow violence: an introduction

“…Violence and dispossession generated by tourism development can be physical, symbolic, or structural, but could be ameliorated with attention to Indigenous, grassroots, and collective forms of tourism that deter colonial "Othering" so integral to much of international tourism development (Devine and Ojeda 2017). Similarly, international efforts at climate adaptation in the Global South can inflict discursive forms of violence on recipient communities that are (re)produced as vulnerable subjects (Mikulewicz 2020).…”

Addressing power and scale in resilience programming: A call to engage across funding, delivery and evaluation

“…Indeed, issues of scale are especially important to reflect as the characteristics of resilience can be different (even contradictory) across spatial, temporal, and social scales (Cumming et al 2017; Frazier et al 2013). Mikulewicz (2020) points to examples of “imagined geographies” of vulnerability produced by development actors used to exclude local actors from engaging in local adaptation governance and reinforcing scalar boundaries.…”