Disrupting Narratives to Challenge Inequalities in Climate Adaptation

A forthcoming Buildings & Cities special issue will examine ways to identify and disrupt ill-suited approaches to urban adaptation. Societies need a more pluralistic, inclusive approach to make adaptation work.

Urgent climate adaptation action is needed in cities all around the world, but progress is slow, and responses tend to be technocratic. Vanesa Castán Broto (University of Sheffield), Marta Olazabal (Basque Centre for Climate Change & Ikerbasque) & Gina Ziervogel (University of Cape Town) explain why disruptive adaptation narratives are needed to align the interests of multiple actors and achieve meaningful change.

Current adaptation responses are inadequate

Cities and urban areas are facing increases in temperatures and heatwaves, water and food scarcity, flash floods and sea-level rise, among other climate impacts. Urban adaptation is an urgent need: even if current efforts were to halt emissions, global average temperatures have already changed enough to demand adaptive responses from human societies (IPCC, 2022).

As the built environment is where people work, live and play, adaptation action in the built environment is likely to raise questions of justice pertaining to people’s daily experiences and understandings (Klinsky & Mavrogianni, 2020).  Most urban adaptation responses fall short of existing needs, have unequal benefits and can lead to unintended consequences (Juhola et al., 2016; Magnan, 2014; Schipper, 2020).

Current approaches, therefore, need to be revised to acknowledge everyday experiences, mobilise multiple actors and capacities, develop institutional commitments and facilitate the deployment of resources required to reduce systematic vulnerabilities and increase the scale of adaptation capacities (Olazabal & Ruiz De Gopegui, 2021; Pelling et al., 2015).

There is wide agreement that adaptation planning should be context-specific and dependent on existing institutional and material constraints, resources, and social and political commitment (IPCC, 2022). However, adaptation is often represented as a neutral intervention, independent from its political and social environmental impacts. Adaptation strategies and interventions tend to be transferred as best practices from one city to another or applied under assumed equal conditions across different parts of the same city. Often, these imaginaries are based upon pioneering experiences of large, rich cities in industrialised countries, which may not be appropriate for the adaptation realities in most cities around the world. Policy and planning practices tend to approach adaptation planning as linear processes that can be replicated widely (Meerow & Woodruff, 2020). Unfortunately, this does not account for many of the varied local circumstances and the needs of diverse populations. 

Developing just adaptation narratives

The 2022 IPCC Working Group II report highlighted that inequality and marginalisation were, along with poverty, important variables that shape vulnerabilities yet are not adequately addressed in adaptation action. Although urbanisation often reduces overall levels of poverty, it also exacerbates spatial inequalities and extreme marginalisation. Current adaptation tools struggle to deal with the changing conditions of urban adaptation.

Local adaptation practices often depend on localised conditions and resources, whose mobilisation may only happen during adaptation planning and practice (Dodman & Mitlin, 2013; Moser & Boykoff, 2013). Practice reveals that urban adaptation also takes place through autonomous incremental change initiatives that deliver resilience in unexpected ways (Ziervogel et al., 2022). This is particularly important for data-poor environments, where institutional support and planning are lacking and where communities themselves play a key role in providing services such as housing, sanitation, or water. These initiatives also portray adaptation as a form of collective action rather than as a top-down imposition (Olazabal & Castán Broto, 2022). There is also a need for transformative capacities, including capacities for leadership, innovation embedding, system awareness, experimentation and foresight (Wolfram et al., 2019). Social learning and institutional innovation capacities can help assess both the positive and negative outcomes of adaptation initiatives and enable social change (Olazabal et al., 2021).

Assessment of local adaptation planning has revealed a lack of attention to context-specific vulnerabilities and risks, a lack of inclusion of local actors in planning and post-evaluation processes, and a lack of specific understanding of the beneficiaries of adaptation actions (Dodman et al., 2022; Olazabal et al., 2019; Olazabal & Ruiz De Gopegui, 2021). Recent work in Europe has shown that while the quality of local plans is gradually increasing, there is a persistent lack of inclusion of vulnerable groups across planning monitoring and evaluation of action (Reckien et al., 2023).

Attempts to integrate justice frameworks into the local climate adaptation planning process are often ineffective (Cannon et al., 2023). Current practices on measuring progress that concentrate on the quality of planning and on measuring outputs have obscured the important influence that measuring and learning can have on successful implementation and management of adaptation (Fisher, 2023; Goonesekera & Olazabal, 2022). Attention to what happens after planning and execution can also broaden the space for more diverse understandings of what successful adaptation is on the ground and how it may evolve for local and indigenous communities facing risks (Cottrell, 2023; Eriksen et al., 2021; Mills-Novoa, 2023). Perhaps the hardest challenge is in acknowledging the diversity of communities and their different vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change (Gannon et al., 2022).

A growing focus in urban adaptation planning and practice is strengthening adaptation in low-income and informal settlements (Finn & Cobbinah, 2023). In this context, top-down solutions are seldom the best approach (Ziervogel, 2021). Rather, collaborative and innovative approaches are needed that draw on local knowledge holders who understand the context in which adaptation response might work (Fox et al., 2023) yet progress on this front is limited (Anguelovski et al., 2016).

Pathways to adapted futures

The 2022 IPCC Working Group II report also highlighted the importance of moving towards Climate Resilient Development Pathways (CRDPs). CRDPs refer to the range of enabling conditions that provide continued opportunities to deliver adaptation action, aligning adaptation goals with the objectives marked in the SDGs and local urban development goals (Singh & Chudasama, 2021). Moving from ad hoc, single, project-based methods to a systemic, multi-actor, and integral response may be a means to deliver CRDPs. In Cape Town, South Africa, adaptation work bringing together multi-institutional groups showed how procedural justice might be strengthened in relation to urban water adaptation. Activists worked with an NGO and academics to collect stories about water access in low-income areas (Enqvist et al., 2022). They used this evidence to support their advocacy work. They also liaised with City of Cape Town officials during the process to get input and try and strengthen engagement across scales to facilitate change on the ground, hoping to improve water access and address distributive justice goals (Ziervogel et al., 2022). Although there was a shift in the relationship between activists and officials, the challenges to maintaining communication and engagement made it hard to continue this work. This highlights the ongoing struggle around making progress on procedural and distributive justice in practice but also speaks to the more hopeful stories that point to innovation and agency at the local level.   

When delivering adaptation actions at the neighbourhood level, it is important not to treat the community as a homogeneous unit adequately represented by political organisation structures (Rigon & Castán Broto, 2021). This challenge has been tackled by scholars of intersectionality, who examine how different systems of oppression interact producing differentiated experiences of discrimination and vulnerability (Collins & Bilge, 2020). Intersectionality calls for understanding a range of potential responses to adaptation, the power and political structures that produce them, and the ways in which they produce discrimination (Ravera et al., 2016). For example, in the city of Cebu, in the Philippines, the vulnerabilities of people living in informal settlements are compounded by the dynamics of expulsion caused by the growing prices and appropriation of the real estate markets. Disruptive adaptation responses must challenge real estate dynamics and facilitate access to land for the most vulnerable, but instead, conventional adaptation response concentrates on the provision of incremental infrastructure and evacuation plans (Ramalho, 2019).

Disrupting adaptation narratives requires new ideas that:

• enjoy global recognition as worthy of international financial support
• address the needs of a rapidly growing urban population, especially addressing the differential vulnerabilities and capacities in informal settlements
• form adaptation alliances across activism, the public sector, businesses, civil society, and academia
• change power structures that cause discrimination and exclusion.

But these characteristics are not sufficient. Disrupting adaptation narratives will entail not thinking of adaptation as an additive condition in this process but as an element integral to a wider systemic change. This calls for new imaginaries of adaptation that move beyond existing knowledge and work towards clear objectives to ensure more just environments for everyone’s well-being (Eriksen et al., 2021).

This requires engaging with CRDPs political projects that force adaptation actors to challenge the inertias that result in growing maladaptation and injustice. 

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