Journal ArticleDOI
Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change adaptation
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In this paper, the authors argue that adaptation is a socio-political process that mediates how individuals and collectives deal with multiple and concurrent environmental and social changes, and apply concepts of subjectivity, knowledges and authority to the analysis of adaptation focuses attention on this sociopolitical process.Abstract:
This paper is motivated by a concern that adaptation and vulnerability research suffer from an under-theorization of the political mechanisms of social change and the processes that serve to reproduce vulnerability over time and space. We argue that adaptation is a socio-political process that mediates how individuals and collectives deal with multiple and concurrent environmental and social changes. We 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 and social theory literatures, we explain how power is reproduced or contested in adaptation practice through these three concepts. We assert 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. We expand on this assertion through four key propositions about how adaptation processes can be understood and outline an emergent empirical research agenda, which 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.read more
Citations
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Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Dark Side of Transformation: Latent Risks in Contemporary Sustainability Discourse
Jessica Blythe,Jennifer J. Silver,Louisa Evans,Derek Armitage,Nathan J. Bennett,Nathan J. Bennett,Nathan J. Bennett,Michele-Lee Moore,Michele-Lee Moore,Tiffany H. Morrison,Katrina Brown +10 more
TL;DR: The authors identify five latent risks associated with discourse that frames transformation as apolitical and/or inevitable and refer to these risks as the dark side of transformation, and suggest that scientists, policymakers, and practitioners need to consider such change in more inherently plural and political ways.
Journal ArticleDOI
Power and politics in climate change adaptation efforts: Struggles over authority and recognition in the context of political instability
TL;DR: In this article, the concepts of authority and recognition are used to capture power and politics as they play out in struggles over governing changing resources, and a case study in Nepal shows how adaptation policy formation and implementation becomes a platform in which actors seek to claim authority and assert more generic rights as political and cultural citizens.
Journal ArticleDOI
Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance?
Siri Eriksen,E. Lisa F. Schipper,Morgan Scoville-Simonds,Morgan Scoville-Simonds,Katharine Vincent,Hans Nicolai Adam,Nick Brooks,Nick Brooks,Brian Harding,Dil B. Khatri,Lutgart Lenaerts,Diana Liverman,Megan Mills-Novoa,Marianne Mosberg,Synne Movik,Benard Muok,Andrea J. Nightingale,Andrea J. Nightingale,Hemant Ojha,Linda Sygna,Marcus Taylor,Coleen Vogel,J. West +22 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction and highlight how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability.
Journal ArticleDOI
Beyond Technical Fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement
Andrea J. Nightingale,Siri Eriksen,Marcus Taylor,Tim Forsyth,Mark Pelling,Andrew Newsham,Emily Boyd,Katrina Brown,Blane Harvey,Lindsey Jones,Rachel Bezner Kerr,Lyla Mehta,Lars Otto Naess,David Ockwell,Ian Scoones,Thomas Tanner,Stephen Whitfield +16 more
TL;DR: This article revisited important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and showed the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations.
References
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Book
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as mentioned in this paper are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Book
Development as Freedom
TL;DR: In this paper, Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know.
Book
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
TL;DR: In this paper, an institutional approach to the study of self-organization and self-governance in CPR situations is presented, along with a framework for analysis of selforganizing and selfgoverning CPRs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Locating the 17th Book of Giddens@@@The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration.
Alan Sica,Anthony Giddens +1 more
TL;DR: Giddens as mentioned in this paper has been in the forefront of developments in social theory for the past decade and outlines the distinctive position he has evolved during that period and offers a full statement of a major new perspective in social thought, a synthesis and elaboration of ideas touched on in previous works but described here for the first time in an integrated and comprehensive form.
Book
The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration
TL;DR: Giddens as discussed by the authors has been in the forefront of developments in social theory for the past decade and outlines the distinctive position he has evolved during that period and offers a full statement of a major new perspective in social thought, a synthesis and elaboration of ideas touched on in previous works but described here for the first time in an integrated and comprehensive form.