No abstract

Since entering the global agenda in the mid-1990s, adaptation to climate change has moved from being considered a largely technical and environmental issue to one rooted in more social and economic circumstances of vulnerable populations. However, research into adaptation has been scarce in terms of analysing power and the politics that in conjunction with socio-economic factors often determine how people in local communities in the Global South respond to climate change. In light of these considerations, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the wider effort to politicize adaptation to climate change research and, as a result, democratize adaptation policy and practice. It is argued that any kind of social vulnerability to climate change is, in essence, political. Once understood as a political process, adaptation should be studied critically by interrogating the local power structures and the resulting political inequalities that determine people's ability to benefit from programmes and projects that aim to facilitate local adaptation. This is necessary if such interventions are to avoid benefitting some while leaving others, and particularly the poor and marginalized, behind. Democratization is seen as a process that must occur (1) between communities and interventions, and (2) within local communities, themselves. The paper concludes with reflections on how democratizing adaptation could function in theory and practice.

Over the last two decades, resilience has steadily gained traction in discussions on the theory and practice of adaptation to climate change. The concept is widely considered useful for explaining how coupled social-ecological systems (SESs) resist climate-related stressors or undergo change. At the same time, however, there has been an upswell of critique on resilience and climate-resilient development, stemming most prominently from the quarters of political ecology and geography. This article seeks to contribute to this literature by using the analytical lens of post-politics to critically evaluate resilience and climate-resilient development in a local adaptation context. Four major critiques are lodged against resilience:(1) its inability to sufficiently recognize the large-scale political, economic, and social forces affecting and effecting change, (2) its oversight of the analyzed systems' internal dynamics, (3) the depoliticized, techno-managerial nature of resilience-centered solutions, and (4) the theoretical vagueness of resilience as applied by development actors. The paper presents a grounded critique of the term based on empirical evidence collected through a quasiethnography of a climate change adaptation project implemented by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the national government in São Tomé and Príncipe. It is argued that resilience, despite its theoretical attractiveness and growing popularity among donors, continues to dehumanize development and renders adaptation post-political. The article also discusses alternative, more human-centered approaches rooted in vulnerability and climate justice, which offer a more nuanced understanding of climate impacts and the associated challenges that they pose at the local level.

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.

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank's Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.