•Adaptation interventions may reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnerability.•Retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas risks maladaptation.•Overcoming these challenges demands ...engaging more deeply with vulnerability contexts.•Real involvement of marginalised groups is required to improve use of climate finance.•Unless adaptation is rethought, transformation may also worsen vulnerability.
This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulnerability context; (ii) inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation; (iii) a retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas; and (iv) a lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined. Emerging literature shows potential avenues for overcoming the current failure of adaptation interventions to reduce vulnerability: first, shifting the terms of engagement between adaptation practitioners and the local populations participating in adaptation interventions; and second, expanding the understanding of ‘local’ vulnerability to encompass global contexts and drivers of vulnerability. An important lesson from past adaptation interventions is that within current adaptation cum development paradigms, inequitable terms of engagement with ‘vulnerable’ populations are reproduced and the multi-scalar processes driving vulnerability remain largely ignored. In particular, instead of designing projects to change the practices of marginalised populations, learning processes within organisations and with marginalised populations must be placed at the centre of adaptation objectives. We pose the question of whether scholarship and practice need to take a post-adaptation turn akin to post-development, by seeking a pluralism of ideas about adaptation while critically interrogating how these ideas form part of the politics of adaptation and potentially the processes (re)producing vulnerability. We caution that unless the politics of framing and of scale are explicitly tackled, transformational interventions risk having even more adverse effects on marginalised populations than current adaptation.
•Adaptation is not a linear, nor static, process.•The politics of adaptation are key to understanding entrenchment, or shifts, in vulnerability.•Subjectivities and authority are both reinforced and ...contested through coping strategies.•The role of ‘illicit’ activities in adaptation processes is contradictory and unpredictable.
This article investigates the role of ‘illicit’ activities in shaping vulnerability dynamics and exemplifies the role of subjectivities and authority in the politics of adaptation. Through drawing on data from several areas in Kitui County in Kenya, the article shows how people are able to use illicit strategies very differently, with differential outcomes on their vulnerability. We suggest that this dynamic has important political dimensions in terms of how authority, legitimacy, subjectivity and social status are reproduced or challenged through the daily practice of how individuals and households within a village engage in strategies to manage shocks and change. We use the term ‘illicit’ here to emphasize that some activities carried out to cope with shocks and change in the study area, namely bush-meat hunting, home-brewing, charcoal production, prostitution, forest uses and theft, are actually subject to legal or social sanctions and repercussions because they are counter to statutory and/or customary law and moral codes. What is seen as socially acceptable locally (and by whom) however, and what sanctions can be expected, is malleable as a result of a dynamic interplay between statutory and customary law and social norms, subjectivity and environmental conditions, which do not always coincide. People may use this to their advantage differentially. Engaging in illicit activities can alter subjectivity and authority, as people are ascribed roles characterized as ‘immoral’ or ‘criminal’, which in turn may affect their social standing and authority in the community. Illicit strategies are, however, also in part an arena where people assume authority and control over their own circumstances and resist rules of what is socially acceptable or not. Longer-term implications of the illicit coping strategies identified in this article were found to be contradictory and unpredictable, multifaceted and complex, particularly in terms of social differentiation and vulnerability. Coping strategies that might make a person or household less vulnerable on one time scale, might make them more vulnerable on another, thereby illustrating that adaptation is not a linear nor static process.
In this paper, we explore the interactions between political, social and environmental changes and forest governance in Kenya, through a study of Mukogodo forest in Laikipia county. Drawing on ...findings from key informant and group interviews as well as analysis of policy documents, we argue that political reform processes – including devolution and changing land and forest policies – combined with “green militarisation” and socio-environmental changes have profound implications for the politics of forest governance in Mukogodo. The way policy reforms interact with wider political dynamics has important implications for the management of environmental change. We find that competing claims to authority both within and between communities are exacerbated by increasingly weaponised resource management regimes, electoral politics and a territorialisation of resource rights. Contestations and tensions between different social groups ensue as some gain secure access to forest resources while others do not. Claims to decision-making authority over resources or to socio-political positions in general are often made based on ethnicity, gender, age, clan, education levels or other dimensions of social differentiation. The way that groups and organisations portray others as mismanaging the forest – and themselves as solving the problem – also forms part of how authority claims are being made in forest governance. The result is a forest governance regime that exhibits less flexibility and cooperation between social groups living in and around the forest, thus undermining livestock mobility and other practices that are critical for the resilience of pastoral systems in a changing climate.
•The politics of forest governance are infused with contestations over authority.•Policy reforms and militarisation shift patterns of authority in forest governance.•Overlapping claims to authority exacerbate inter-group tensions.•Policy reforms produce particular types of subjectivities.•Forest governance in a changing climate requires flexibility and inclusiveness.
This article examines adaptation to climate change in view of changing humanitarian approaches in Isiolo County, Kenya. While humanitarian actors are increasingly integrating climate change in their ...international and national-level strategies, we know less about how this plays out at sub-national levels, which is key to tracking whether and how short-term assistance can support long-term adaptation. The article suggests that increasing attention to resilience and adaptation among humanitarian actors may not lead to reduced vulnerability because resources tend to be captured through existing power structures, directed by who you know and your place in the social hierarchy. In turn, this sustains rather than challenges the marginalisation processes that cause vulnerability to climate shocks and stressors. The article highlights the important role of power and politics both in channelling resources and determining outcomes.
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