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Cross-Chapter Box ADAPT | Adaptation science
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Increasingly reflective adaptation research
Another characteristic of recent adaptation research is a stronger focus on ethics, justice and power (Byskov et al., 2021; Coggins et al., 2021; Eriksen et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2021). Researchers and practitioners are increasingly impatient to address the root causes of vulnerability and use inclusive climate adaptation processes to generate effective adaptation responses for marginalised and misrecognised groups (Tschakert et al., 2013; Eriksen et al., 2015; Scoones et al., 2015; Gillard et al., 2016; Wisner, 2016). Increasingly ambitious, normative adaptation research often challenges technological solutions that simply reinforce the existing status quo (Nightingale et al., 2019, p. 2) and calls for ‘socially just pathways for change’. Here work on adaptation overlaps with mitigation, transitions and other large-scale social change, encouraging the move towards more systemic, integrated approaches that discern between options according to multiple criteria (Goldman et al., 2018).
Fundamental questions about equity and justice in adaptation include gender and intersectionality (see Cross-Chapter Box GENDER in Chapter 18; Section 1.4.1.1; Chapter 18;) and broader critiques of who participates in processes of adaptation planning and implementation, who receives investments, who and what benefits from them, who makes key decisions regarding adjustments through time (Taylor et al., 2014; Boeckmann and Zeeb, 2016; Nightingale et al., 2019; Pelling and Garschagen, 2019; Byskov et al., 2021; Eriksen et al., 2021) and how climate justice intersects with other justice agendas. Attention is also turning to relations and tensions between different adaptation approaches, scales, constraints, limits, losses, enablers and outcomes (Barnett et al., 2015; Pelling et al., 2015; Mechler and Schinko, 2016; Crichton and Esteban, 2017; Gharbaoui and Blocher, 2017; Deshpande et al., 2018; McNamara and Jackson, 2019). Evident here is an ongoing, serious knowledge gap around the long-term repercussions of adaptation interventions. There is growing awareness of the need to address the potential for maladaptation (Sections 1.4.2.4; 5.13.3; 15.5.1; 17.5.2; Chapter 4). Concerns about maladaptation have led to renewed calls to open the ‘black box’ of decision making to examine the influence of power relationships, politics and institutional culture (Biesbroek et al., 2013; Eriksen et al., 2015; Goldman et al., 2018), including the power–adaptation linkage itself (Woroniecki et al., 2019), external factors outside the decision-making process (Eisenack et al., 2014) and the influence of leadership on adaptation processes and outcomes (Meijerink et al., 2014; Vignola et al., 2017).
All of these developments indicate that adaptation research is not only more reflexive about some of its central assumptions, methodologies and tools (Biesbroek et al., 2013; Conway and Mustelin, 2014; Nalau et al., 2015; Nightingale, 2015a; Porter et al., 2015; Eriksen et al., 2015; Lubell and Niles, 2019; Woroniecki et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2021), but also cognisant of the need to critically consider its underpinning goals, purpose and impact in the world.
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