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Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance?

May 2021
World Development 141(4):105383

DOI:10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105383

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CC BY 4.0

Authors:

Siri Hallstrom Eriksen

Norwegian University of Life Sciences

Lisa Schipper

University of Bonn

Morgan Scoville-Simonds

University of Agder

Katharine Vincent

University of the Witwatersrand

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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.

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Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing

countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance?

Siri Eriksen

⇑

, E. Lisa F. Schipper

, Morgan Scoville-Simonds

c,d

, Katharine Vincent

e,f

, Hans Nicolai Adam

Nick Brooks

h,i

, Brian Harding

, Dil Khatri

, Lutgart Lenaerts

l,n

, Diana Liverman

, Megan Mills-Novoa

Marianne Mosberg

, Synne Movik

, Benard Muok

, Andrea Nightingale

q,r

, Hemant Ojha

s,t

, Linda Sygna

Marcus Taylor

, Coleen Vogel

, Jennifer Joy West

Department of Public Health Science, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway

Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK

Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland

Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Section for Water and Society, Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Oslo, Norway

Garama 3C Ltd., Norwich, UK

Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Center for Governance and Sustainability, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States

Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS), Kathmandu, Nepal

Department of Plant Sciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway

School of Geography, Development and Environment, University of Arizona, USA

Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway

Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway

Centre for Research Innovation and Technology, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST), Kenya

Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Norway

Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance,, University of Canberra, Australia

Institute for Study and Development Worldwide, Sydney, Australia

cCHANGE Transformation in a Changing Climate, Oslo, Norway

Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Canada

Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

CICERO Centre for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway

article info

Article history:

Accepted 23 December 2020

Keywords:

Climate change adaptation

Vulnerability

Climate resilient development

Maladaptation

Post-adaptation

Development interventions

abstract

This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate

change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently rein-

force, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive out-

comes: (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 par-

ticipating 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 vulner-

ability remain largely ignored. In particular, instead of designing projects to change the practices of

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105383

0305-750X/Ó2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

⇑

Corresponding author.

E-mail addresses: siri.eriksen@nmbu.no (S. Eriksen), Lisa.schipper@ouce.ox.ac.uk (E. Lisa F. Schipper), morganss@uia.no (M. Scoville-Simonds), katharine@kulima.com (K.

Vincent), Hans.adam@niva.no (H.N. Adam), nb@garama.co.uk (N. Brooks), bharding@gcfund.org (B. Harding), dil@sias-southasia.org (D. Khatri), Lutgart.lenaerts@nmbu.no (L.

Lenaerts), liverman@email.arizona.edu (D. Liverman), mmillsnovoa@email.arizona.edu (M. Mills-Novoa), Marianne.mosberg@nmbu.no (M. Mosberg), Synne.movik@nmbu.no

(S. Movik), bmuok@yahoo.com (B. Muok), Andrea.nightingale@sosgeo.uio.no (A. Nightingale), hemant.ojha@ifsd.com.aucom (H. Ojha), Linda.sygna@cchange.no (L. Sygna),

taylorm@queensu.ca (M. Taylor), Coleen.vogel@wits.ac.za (C. Vogel), j.j.west@cicero.oslo.no (J.J. West).

World Development 141 (2021) 105383

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

World Development

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

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 adapta-

tion 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.

Ó2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article underthe CC BY license (http://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction: The cause for concern

Inequalities in climate change adaptation have long been on the

radar of international institutions. The 1994 United Nations Frame-

work Convention on Climate Change, for example, recognised the

inequity underlying climate change causes and effects, subse-

quently enshrining mechanisms of ﬁnancial support and technol-

ogy transfer to developing countries to enable adaptation.

Notwithstanding such measures, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond

Tutu warned over a decade later of an ‘adaptation apartheid’ in

which those in the developing world who are most exposed to

stark new climatic challenges would not have the resources to

adapt (UNDP, 2007). The broader 2030 agenda and associated Sus-

tainable Development Goals now highlight the need to ’leave no

one behind’, yet studies continue to warn of the risk of unintended

negative consequences stemming from adaptation interventions

for poverty and other goals (Magnan et al., 2016; Work et al.,

2019). A large body of literature now documents how social divi-

sions on the basis of gender, race, age, (dis)ability or class deter-

mine who is vulnerable to climate change and who has greater

ability to adapt (Pearse, 2017; Vincent et al., 2014). As a conse-

quence of entrenched discrimination in society, one person’s adap-

tation may be accomplished at the cost of another’s increased

vulnerability (Taylor, 2015; Thomas et al., 2019). In short, inequal-

ity shapes climate change adaptation and, if it is not accounted for

in adaptation design, implementation or evaluation, interventions

may either be ineffectual or – worse – increase the vulnerability

of those they seek to aid (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013;

Shackleton et al., 2015; Schipper et al., 2020).

Identifying the mechanisms through which negative effects can

unfold in adaptation interventions must inform future adaptation

policy. So far, however, examinations of adaptation interventions

have either focused on a narrow range of technical or economic

objectives or assessed the adaptation approaches or design, rather

than the wider social impacts of interventions on the drivers of

vulnerability (Kuhl et al., 2020). Hence, to date there has been no

independent review of the impacts on social vulnerability of inter-

national or bilateral funded interventions. However, a large num-

ber of theoretical developments and individual empirical case

studies are emerging that provide a basis to identify systemic fea-

tures of the framing, ﬁnancing, planning, implementation, moni-

toring and evaluation of adaptation interventions.

In addition to this literature, there is also growing interest in

transformative adaptation, which looks beyond a programmatic

approach to adaptation and views it instead as an opportunity ‘to

reconﬁgure the meaning and trajectory of development’ (Pelling,

2011: 167; Pelling et al., 2015). Transformation is thus distinct

from incremental adaptation in ‘the extent of change, in practice

manifesting either in the maintenance of an incumbent system

or process, or in the creation of a fundamentally new system or

process’ (Park et al., 2012, p. 119). This distinction between ‘incre-

mental’ adaptation and ‘transformative’ adaptation is reminiscent

of the debates between the ‘natural hazards’ school that located

risk in the hazard itself, in contrast to the political economists

who instead emphasised the underlying sources of vulnerability

located in a wide range of social stressors, as well as the biophys-

ical ones (Bassett and Fogelman, 2013). Transformative adaptation

requires shifting inequitable socio-political relations as well as the

worldviews and paradigms within which they are (re)produced

(O’Brien, 2018; Tschakert, van Oort, St. Clair, & LaMadrid, 2013)

In this paper, we see vulnerability as a fundamentally relational

state. Rather than referring to ‘vulnerable people’, a term that con-

stitutes a common but problematic categorisation of groups such

as women as inherently vulnerable (Arora-Jonsson, 2011), we refer

to ‘marginalised people’ in order to direct attention to the socio-

political relations, such as gender and race relations, that produce

socially differentiated vulnerability (Eriksen et al., 2015).

In surveying the adaptation literature, we review past and cur-

rent interventions to highlight the speciﬁc mechanisms that

increase the risk of maladaptive outcomes. This review paper orig-

inated as a request by the Norwegian Minister for Development

Cooperation to document how adaptation policy and programmes

are affecting vulnerability, including both positive and negative

impacts. In response, we gathered a large number of adaptation

and development scholar-practitioners to examine empirical case

studies of adaptation across the developing world. These were

identiﬁed through keyword searches and snowballing from refer-

ence lists, encompassing both scholarly and grey literature, begin-

ning with interventions familiar to the authors. In total 34

empirical studies of adaptation interventions were reviewed

The cases were selected on the criteria that actual adaptation actions

were implemented through programmes and projects all nominally

labelled ‘adaptation’ in their objectives. The selected interventions

were either funded directly through multilateral organisations or

mechanisms, or through national or local actions supported by bilat-

eral or multilateral aid. The cases were iteratively analysed to distin-

guish impacts of the actions on different groups within a

vulnerability context, on the socio-environmental conditions com-

prising a vulnerability context, and on the processes and inequitable

relations generating socially differentiated vulnerability. Findings

from this analysis were situated in the broader adaptation and crit-

ical development literature, including reviews and conceptual devel-

opment. Evidence of how different ways of planning and

implementation contributed to the impacts of the interventions on

vulnerability was then examined. For the second component, we

complemented our analysis of empirical case studies with a review

of a broader set of past studies that describe the mechanisms

As examined in section 2: Abbink et al. (2014),Artur and Hilhorst (2012),Barrett

(2014),Beckman (2011),Bergius et al. (2018),Buggy and McNamara (2016),Camargo

and Ojeda (2017),Carr & Owusu-Daaku, 2016,Dodman and Mitlin (2015),Donner and

Webber (2014),Ferdous et al. (2020),Haji and Legesse (2017),Kita (2019),Kothari

(2014),Magnan et al. (2016),Mehta et al. (2019), Mikulewicz (2020a), Milman and

Arsano (2014),Murtinho et al. (2013),Nightingale (2017),Murtinho, Eakin, López-

Carr, & Hayes, 2013,Nelson and Finan (2009),Ojwang et al. (2017),Omukuti (2020a),

Pak-Uthai and Faysse (2018),Paprocki (2018),Tänzler, Maas, & Carius, 2010,Taylor

and Bhasme (2020),Thomas and Warner (2019),Tschakert et al. (2016),Warner and

Kuzdas (2016),West et al. (2018),Yates (2012),Karlsson, Naess, Nightingale &

Thompson (2018). The analysis in sections 3 and 4 drew on further empirical studies

as referenced in the text.

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

through which adaptation interventions are implemented, including

planning, assessment, monitoring, evaluation, knowledge and partic-

ipation processes.

Our examination was carried out acknowledging that

internationally-funded interventions are only a sub-set of adapta-

tion actions. Such actions range from daily decision-making by

individuals, to collective action and formal adaptation policy mak-

ing, and together make up the processes of adaptation to climatic

uncertainty and change by societies (Pelling, 2011; Wang et al.,

2013; Eriksen et al., 2015). Our focus was nonetheless on the pro-

liferation of programmes and projects, taking place as part of

national and local adaptation planning, that collectively frame cli-

mate interventions on the ground.

An independent, critical review of adaptation interventions is

timely as the global stocktake of the Paris Agreement requires

countries to measure progress on climate adaptation. However,

in order for adaptation interventions to contribute to equitable

and sustainable vulnerability reduction, and to measure progress

in this endeavour, the structures around ﬁnancing, planning,

implementation, monitoring and evaluation of interventions that

frame climate intervention processes may need to be redesigned.

In particular, our ﬁndings suggest that adaptation knowledge

within interventions, and within the adaptation-development

funding apparatus itself, may need to change towards more reﬂex-

ive, multi-scalar and inclusive learning and evaluation processes.

The paper is divided into four sections. In section two, we

explore how adaptation interventions have impacted vulnerability

in both intended and unintended ways, illustrating how they can

reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. In

section three we synthesise the literature to identify the primary

reasons that some adaptation interventions have inequitable

impacts. We highlight four features: namely, (i) the failure to com-

prehensively consider the vulnerability context; (ii) the lack of

inclusive and equitable participation in the design and implemen-

tation of interventions; (iii) the retroﬁtting of adaptation project

goals to match existing development efforts; and (iv) pervading

the three ﬁrst features, the tendency of interventions to insufﬁ-

ciently conceptualise what ‘adaptation success’ comprises. Little

attention is paid to how the meaning of such success varies and

is contested between different groups. As a result, dominant devel-

opment discourses implicitly deﬁne such success, contributing to a

conserving of the status quo rather than imagining more transfor-

mative measures required in the face of climate change and

inequity. In section four we explore how better linking of adapta-

tion research, policy and programming could help overcome these

challenges by ﬁrst, shifting the terms of engagement between

adaptation practitioners and the local populations participating

in adaptation interventions; and second, expanding an under-

standing of ‘local’ vulnerability to encompass global contexts and

drivers of vulnerability.

2. Evidence of the effect of adaptation interventions on

vulnerability

Despite assertions in policy, practice and academia of adapta-

tion reducing vulnerability to climate change, we found clear evi-

dence to the contrary. In particular, three features emerge. First,

some interventions reinforce existing vulnerability; second, others

simply redistribute vulnerability; and third, some measures intro-

duce new sources of vulnerability. In this section we elaborate on

these three features. In all cases, it is worth noting that the rein-

forcement, redistribution or creation of new vulnerability tends

to follow the same social cleavages that create differential vulner-

ability and equality in the ﬁrst place – such as gender, race, age

(dis)ability and class. Consequently it is typically those who are

most marginalised and to whom society accords the least socio-

political power that end up with compounded vulnerability. The

idea that an adaptation intervention can result in vulnerability is

embodied in the notion of maladaptation (Antwi-Agyei, Dougill,

Stringer, & Codjoe, 2018; Juhola, Glaas, Linnér, & Neset, 2016;

Magnan et al., 2016). While many of the examples described below

can be considered maladaptive, rather than label them as such, we

are seeking to unpack the reason why they are increasing vulnera-

bility rather than reducing it.

2.1. Reinforcing existing vulnerability

Despite aiming to meet the needs of disadvantaged socio-

economic groups and those who are most vulnerable to climatic

shocks and stresses, adaptation interventions are prone to elite

capture, a long-standing problem in development whereby power-

ful people expropriate funds, resulting in interventions that rein-

force existing power relations (Artur & Hilhorst, 2012; Dasgupta

& Beard, 2007; Kita, 2019; Rusca, Schwartz, Hadzovic, & Ahlers,

2015). Our review indicates that goals and priorities for adaptation

interventions are often set in a top-down manner by relatively

privileged groups rather than being framed by the intended bene-

ﬁciaries, leading to a skewed distribution of beneﬁts in favour of

local elites.

Evidence for elite capture and manipulation exists from around

the world. A process of reliance on privileged insiders for imple-

mentation has been observed in adaptation interventions in Nepal,

India and Tanzania, where the relatively wealthy and inﬂuential

community members monopolise beneﬁts and manipulate new

projects for political ends (Yates, 2012; Nightingale, 2017; Taylor

and Bhasme, 2020; Omukuti, 2020a). Sometimes this process is

explicitly political, wherein national-level resources are directed

for the speciﬁc purposes of patronage and obtaining political sup-

port within target constituencies, as observed in Brazil and

Mozambique (Nelson and Finan, 2009; Artur and Hilhorst, 2012).

In other instances, people’s vulnerability is used explicitly as an

excuse for not including them in projects. Examining cases around

the world, Thomas and Warner (2019) identify a tendency to

‘weaponise vulnerability’ where vulnerable groups are seen as

potential security threats, legitimising measures aimed at protect-

ing the elite from these marginalised people. In northern Colombia,

an Adaptation Fund project selected beneﬁciaries for post-disaster

housing from the national registry, yet the most vulnerable were

largely unable to navigate the bureaucratic processes involved to

and increased out-migration (Camargo and Ojeda, 2017).

Elite capture may also emerge inadvertently through poor

intervention design. As a precondition for participation, projects

often require investments such as commitments of land, time,

labour or material inputs, which the poorest and disadvantaged

frequently lack (Camargo and Ojeda, 2017; Nagoda and

Nightingale, 2017; Mikulewicz, 2020a). Adaptation measures may

support particular agricultural practices or livelihood changes that

disproportionately beneﬁt those with land, while penalising the

land-poor, as exempliﬁed for the case of Vietnam (Chapman

et al., 2016). Similarly, adaptation measures in São Tomé and Prin-

cipe were found to exacerbate inequitable labour relations, push-

ing small-scale farmers into casual labour for larger landowners

(Mikulewicz, 2020a).

Exclusion of marginalised groups from adaptation interventions

may also take place due to geographical constraints, particularly

when intervention design and participatory processes take place

in locations that are convenient to funding and/or implementing

agencies, agendas and well-connected groups (typically, those liv-

ing near administrative centres and well-maintained roads) yet

distant from the most marginalised communities. Similarly, to

ensure rapid success of interventions, implementing agencies often

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

return to communities and networks where established institu-

tional capacity exists while remote and marginalised areas remain

excluded (Barrett, 2014; Pak-Uthai and Faysse, 2018). For example,

a study of 27 bilateral and multilateral donors to Malawi found

that proportionately less adaptation ﬁnance arrived in the areas

of highest need, with the poorest receiving the least (Barrett,

2014). This occurred despite the stated commitment of multilat-

eral (World Bank, African Development Bank) and bilateral (Nor-

way, Japan, UK) development agencies working in the country to

design interventions targeting the needs of the most vulnerable.

Actual distribution of funding nevertheless reﬂected donor utility

– such as pre-existing aid activities in the area and ease of access

– and the ability to absorb capital. The latter has sometimes been

an explicit selection criterion for receiving support (Climate

Investment Funds, 2009). While organising interventions through

local intermediaries already known to agency staff can fast-track

implementation of activities, it also risks making the project reliant

on established power relations and processes of elite capture

(Artur and Hilhorst, 2012; West et al., 2018; Taylor and Bhasme,

2020). In addition to potential duplication of efforts, this also opens

opportunities for political manipulation, which was observed in

the case of adaptation to water scarcity in Colombia (Murtinho,

Eakin, López-Carr, & Hayes, 2013). Here, funding was overly dis-

tributed to least-affected regions, while regions with severe water

scarcity received less, in part due to pre-existing development

activities but also due to political connections in the more favoured

regions.

In cases of both deliberate and inadvertent elite capture, a

monopolisation of project resources can lead to a form of ‘accumu-

lation by adaptation’ that widens inequality and undermines

broader adaptation goals. In addition and related to such an ‘accu-

mulation by adaptation’, adaptation interventions can also rein-

force existing inequalities in the distribution of decision-making

authority. For example, Mikulewicz (2020a) shows that in São

Tomé and Príncipe, adaptation interventions are only offered to

those who have land, ignoring the landless. On a broader level,

adaptation policies often fail to alter the social and political

dynamics that have produced vulnerability patterns in the ﬁrst

place (Pelling et al., 2015; Nagoda and Nightingale, 2017). It has

been demonstrated that even adaptation processes speciﬁcally

aiming to foster participation and social inclusion can entrench,

rather than challenge, existing power relations (Buggy and

McNamara, 2016). For example, a study by Karlsson et al. (2018)

of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), an approach that seeks to

address mitigation, adaptation, and enhanced food security, illus-

trates that interventions have implications for both asset distribu-

tion and decision-making. CSA may unjustly shift the burden of

responsibility for mitigation to marginalised producers and

resource managers (a problem of distributive equity, or ‘‘who gets

what”). At the same time, CSA often fails to overcome existing

power relations (a problem of procedural equity, or ‘‘who deci-

des”). The political nature of change is seldom acknowledged,

resulting in lost opportunities for enhancing institutions that

underpin the bargaining power of marginalised groups (Karlsson

et al., 2018).

The tendency of interventions to reinforce inequitable socio-

political relations is particularly acute in the context of conﬂict.

Some adaptation efforts take place in violent settings, where con-

ﬂict is a major cause of vulnerability to climate change, and vio-

lence and insecurity may stall or delay implementation of

interventions (Peters et al., 2019). However, climate change inter-

ventions seldom tackle inequitable power relations head-on, and

often assume that adaptation takes place in peaceful, non-

conﬂictual settings. As a result, adaptation measures are often seen

as purely technical interventions and implemented without prop-

erly considering conﬂict dynamics or political contexts (Tänzler,

Maas, & Carius, 2010; Levine et al., 2014). Climate change and con-

ﬂict resolution/peacebuilding efforts also have traditionally oper-

ated as two entirely separate sectors with very limited

engagement between them (Matthew, 2014). This means that syn-

ergies are largely ignored, although there are some recent attempts

to bring them together within the ﬁeld of environmental peace-

building (Schilling et al., 2017; Ide, 2020).

Furthermore, there are increasing concerns that climate change

interventions may not only reinforce inequitable power relations,

but also serve to exacerbate existing political tensions or conﬂict

dynamics – especially in situations where interventions reinforce

particular livelihood activities, alter power relations and institu-

tions of environmental governance, or shift patterns of authority

over natural resources that are already highly contested (Corbera

et al., 2017;Nightingale, 2017). As highlighted by a growing num-

ber of scholars, such as Abrahams & Carr, 2017; Tänzler, Maas, &

Carius, 2010, and Work (2019), conﬂicts may not necessarily

emerge as a direct result of climate change, but instead as a conse-

quence of climate change interventions implemented ‘in the name

of climate change’. These dynamics are illustrated by the case of

Gambella, Ethiopia, where Milman and Arsano (2014) found that

climate change adaptation efforts served to increase rather than

decrease tensions in the region, due to their differentiated impacts

on human security. The Villagisation Programme targeting pas-

toralists and the Ethiopian Agricultural Development Led Industri-

alisation (ADLI) strategies were intended to reduce vulnerability.

However, by creating areas that were off-limits to local popula-

tions, these strategies effectively reduced these people’s access to

land and resources traditionally relied upon during periods of

stress like ﬂoods and droughts, thereby increasing vulnerability

for some groups and exacerbating socio-political tensions in the

region (Milman and Arsano, 2014). Of particular concern is how

interventions operating in (semi-)authoritarian contexts may end

up avoiding topics considered too sensitive for the government –

but which are root causes of vulnerability – such as widespread

discrimination of minority ethnic- and religious groups, intra-

state conﬂict and violence, or violations of human rights. This

has been a particular concern within the humanitarian arena (del

Valle and Healy, 2013; Décobert, 2020) extending Dodman and

Mitlin’s (2015) observation that local and national political con-

texts matter greatly for the effectiveness of development interven-

tions, and in particular their ability to reach the most vulnerable

groups of people.

There is thus an expanding literature that shows that the cli-

mate change adaptation process itself – as any societal change –

takes place through convergence and tensions between different

interests, as well as contestations over who has the authority to

make decisions (Taylor, 2015; Tschakert et al., 2016). Adaptation

takes place through socio-political and environmental disruptions

and turbulence; indeed, adaptation itself may need to be disruptive

or transformative in order to overcome a status quo that produces

vulnerability (Wilson, 2014). Power here is conceptualised as fun-

damentally relational with the focus on its exercise through

authority, knowledges and subjectivities (Eriksen et al., 2015;

Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2018). Social actors exercise power as

they attempt to shape the institutional and discursive contexts

through which programmes are designed, enacted, legitimatised

and contested (Nightingale, 2017). At the same time, such efforts

to shape adaptation processes always contain an element of uncer-

tainty and resistance. Successfully inﬂuencing how planning pro-

ceeds, including shaping the ofﬁcial and informal aims of

projects, the ways in which funds and contracts are distributed,

the forums and mechanisms for participation and decision making,

and the discursive parameters that shape the identities assumed

by subjects within adaptation practices bolsters authority. In con-

trast, the inability to assert authority over such parameters rein-

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

forces subordinate social and political relations, serving to further

marginalise those without inﬂuence (Mosse, 2010; Taylor, 2015).

The exercise of power is therefore inherently relational: it is simul-

taneously enabling or facilitating for some and constraining or dis-

abling for others in ways that strongly inﬂuence the distribution of

authority, resources and risks across adaptation projects.

Climate change policies and interventions are therefore nested

in existing power relations and political contestations. At the core

of these contestations, we ﬁnd struggles connected to identity and

belonging (Nightingale, 2017). Questions such as ‘who are the

rightful owners of this environment and resources?’ and ‘who

should make decisions about how we use this environment in

the face of climate change?’ are essentially political questions that

cannot be addressed only through technocratic climate change

interventions. In bypassing such discussions and effectively

depoliticising climate change efforts, development actors may

reproduce rather than challenge the political and social status

quo, and unintentionally contribute to further marginalise the

interests and needs of the least powerful people. They may also

serve to ultimately entrench systems and behaviours that are

unsustainable in the face of climate change, particularly where

adaptation actions are manipulated to support existing priorities

and interests (Atteridge & Remling, 2018; Levine et al., 2014).

2.2. Measures that redistribute vulnerability

Alongside reinforcing existing inequalities and vulnerability,

there is a risk with some interventions that there may be offsite

effects that lead to a redistribution of vulnerability over a broader

spatial area or among other groups (Atteridge & Remling, 2018;

Thomas & Warner, 2019).

Interventions related to water and coastal areas are common

examples of spatially shifting vulnerability and risk and failing to

recognise how infrastructural and technical interventions reshape

power relations. In Vietnam, hydroelectric dam and forest protec-

tion policies may contribute to regulating ﬂoods in lowlands and

thus at ﬁrst appear beneﬁcial for reducing vulnerability to speciﬁc

hazards there (Beckman, 2011). However, at the same time, these

policies undermine access to land and forest resources for moun-

tain peoples (who are already socio-politically marginalised),

which directly interferes with their abilities to exercise power in

relation to who controls their resources and what knowledges

and practices they use to govern them, reducing their adaptive

capacity. Other examples include how ﬂood embankments protect-

ing one community can increase the vulnerability of downstream

communities, and how coastal infrastructure designed to reduce

risk can negatively affect neighbouring coastal areas or the local

ecology (Donner and Webber, 2014; Ferdous et al., 2020). Also in

Vietnam, the Ecopark housing development in Hanoi is described

as a sustainable living environment, yet it required the eviction

of 4000 families who had previously been living on the land

(Thomas and Warner, 2019). Similar processes can occur at any

scale (cases reviewed in Atteridge & Remling, 2018). Adaptation

in one area may also alter regional or global market conditions.

For example, increased use of expensive and sophisticated agro-

technologies as a response to drought by politically and economi-

cally advantaged social actors introduces new risks through divert-

ing resources away from agrarian development programmes

intended to target the rural poor (Warner and Kuzdas, 2016).

2.3. Introducing new risks and sources of vulnerability

In addition to the danger of interventions reinforcing or redis-

tributing existing inequalities and vulnerability, empirical studies

of adaptation interventions suggest that some adaptation efforts

introduce new risks and sources of vulnerability. For example,

the IPCC Special Report on the impacts of 1.5 °C warming identiﬁed

several ways in which adaptation efforts can increase economic,

social and environmental costs, or undermine existing local adap-

tation strategies: increased (unregulated) fertiliser and pesticide

use can create risks to both human health and ecological systems;

increased irrigation in agriculture may reduce water availability for

domestic and other purposes; and some adaptation measures

increase workloads, economic costs or debt to farmers (IPCC,

2018).

A ﬁrst type of risk that can be introduced by adaptation efforts

results from implementing measures that address short term con-

cerns but inadvertently introduce longer-term risks. A particular

form of risk arises when a moral hazard known as a ‘safe develop-

ment paradox’ is promoted, such as building dykes to protect from

ﬂooding (Burby, 2006). These efforts can create a false sense of

security in a location that encourages high-risk activities. Evidence

of this is found in many places, including in Bangladesh, where a

large project that focused on upgrading coastal infrastructure to

protect it from tropical cyclones, storm surges, ﬂoods and sea-

level rise, served to encourage people to remain in these high-

risk areas, thus resulting in maladaptation (Magnan et al., 2016).

This case illustrates what can happen when decision making

focuses on the trade-off between avoiding near-term disruption

and reducing future risk, in which the preference is for incremental

adaptation that protects and preserves existing systems and beha-

viours, over transformative adaptation that will disrupt them or

require their abandonment or displacement. Policymakers often

see incremental adaptation and its infrastructural ﬁxes as the only

option. This failure to imagine more transformative adaptation

options by thinking more holistically about the overall problem

may introduce new risks in the long term.

In addition, initiatives that do not consider long-term projected

climate impacts may be unsustainable or produce negative path

dependencies in the long term. ‘Reactive’ adaptation initiatives –

which might also be described as ‘coping’ – are commonplace.

These are responses to existing and well-known recurrent impacts

over the short term such as infrastructure to combat ﬂooding or

efforts to increase agricultural productivity in areas that see

increasing drought, observed both at household and policy level

(Ojwang et al., 2017; Antwi-Agyei et al., 2018). While addressing

vulnerability to current climate variability and impacts is impor-

tant, it is rarely enough to adapt to future climate change (Dilling

et al., 2015; Mikulewicz and Taylor, 2020). A review of 31 adapta-

tion case studies across the world found evidence of temporal ‘re-

bound’ effects: for example, hard seawall infrastructure that

decreases ﬂexibility of future options; redirecting traditional liveli-

hoods to (over)specialized options that may only be effective in the

short run; and irrigation and water management interventions

with negative impacts on the environment as well as on longer

term adaptive capacity (Juhola, Glaas, Linnér, & Neset, 2016). These

temporal reboud effects constitute a risk given uncertainty regard-

ing the future manifestations and impacts of climate change (Levin

et al., 2012; IPCC, 2018), combined with the preference for techni-

cal adaptation solutions, for example infrastructure, which have

long lifespans and cause lock-in (UNEP, 2017). Managing uncer-

tainties through more ﬂexible, inclusive, and locally appropriate

technologies, knowledge and assessments is thus key towards

achieving more transformative adaptation pathways (Mehta

et al., 2019).

Second, several studies have documented cases of climate ini-

tiatives undermining local adaptation strategies through (often

unintended) negative consequences on resource access and land

rights critical to local populations’ livelihoods and environmental

governance systems. In a case study of municipal funding of adap-

tation to water scarcity by 111 rural water associations in Colom-

bia, top-down interventions (i.e. fund distribution decisions taken

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

by actors external to the community) were associated with clien-

telism and control and were less effective than locally-driven ini-

tiatives by community water organisations, which were ‘crowded

out’ by external interventions (Murtinho, Eakin, López-Carr, &

Hayes, 2013).

The most extreme cases of top-down interventions introducing

vulnerability come from (re)settlement policies. Pastoralists in the

peripheral lowlands of Ethiopia have recently been forced to settle

as part of the country’s Climate Resilient Green Economy Strategy.

While the resettlement aims to build climate resilience, current

and past settlement programmes in Ethiopia’s peripheral lowlands

have led to further marginalisation, decreased food security, and

exacerbated vulnerability for pastoralists (Abbink et al., 2014;

Haji and Legesse, 2017). In the lower Zambezi valley of Mozam-

bique, international climate adaptation ﬁnance has played an inad-

vertent role in supporting the government’s controversial

relocation policies. These relocations, focusing on some of the most

politically and economically marginalised groups in Mozambique,

have been accomplished through persuasion, threat of military

force or arrest, and the withdrawal of basic services (e.g. schools

and clinics) from villages that refuse to relocate. While donors

and donor-funded NGOs may not explicitly support or participate

in relocations, the promotion by such actors of increased focus

on climate change hazards can provide governments with spurious

justiﬁcations for policies involving relocation and coercive liveli-

hood transformations (Arnall, 2014; Artur and Hilhorst, 2012;

Kothari, 2014).

As these cases emphasise, adaptation measures imposed from

above often lead to disruptive changes – with short-sighted goals

– that cannot easily be reversed. This lock-in effect, whereby com-

munities become wedded to potentially negative pathways of

change, has been observed in diverse contexts (Wilson, 2014).

Bergius et al. (2018) describe how ‘green economy’-oriented

public-private partnerships in Tanzania supported by the Norwe-

gian Fund for International Development (Norfund), including

investments in agriculture, conservation, and climate measures,

entailed the forced replacement of small-scale farming and livestock

herding with wetland conservation and commercial farming. This

transformation of land use and production systems has increased

the vulnerability of many households, in addition to undermining

the economic sustainability of agricultural production. In Bangla-

desh, Paprocki (2018) found that local elites and donors used pro-

jects supported by adaptation ﬁnance to move vulnerable

populations out of agrarian livelihoods and into urban livelihoods,

such as factory labour, further marginalising agrarian communities

and promoting the developmental priorities of elites. Together,

these examples of top-down interventions or efforts to enforce

livelihood transformations raise the concern that adaptation inter-

ventions can become a means of increasing government and elite

control over marginalised people’s livelihoods, natural resource

management, and autonomous adaptation strategies, further dis-

empowering them and creating new sources of vulnerability.

3. Mechanisms undermining equitable vulnerability reduction

As our examination of past adaptation case studies and reviews

has revealed, interventions—despite good intentions and positive

effects on some groups—can contribute to reinforcing, redistribut-

ing or creating new sources of vulnerability. In this section, we

draw on the empirical cases examined above, as well as a growing

body of literature on adaptation processes and the practical expe-

rience of the authors, in order to identify the mechanisms through

which such unintended consequences occur. Four such key mech-

anisms emerge from this analysis: (i) insufﬁcient understanding of

contextual vulnerability by interventions planners and imple-

menters, including socio-political relations of gender, race, age

(dis)ability and class; (ii) inequitable participation by vulnerable

and affected groups in planning and implementation, leading to

top-down processes and poor representation of marginalised

groups’ perspectives; (iii) retroﬁtting adaptation into existing

development ideas, projects, and forms of assistance; and (iv)

insufﬁcient engagement with what ‘adaptation success’ consti-

tutes, dominant development discourses implicitly deﬁning such

success.

3.1. Insufﬁcient understanding of contextual vulnerability

Reducing the vulnerability of the most marginalised requires a

deep understanding of the history of past and current socio-

politics of vulnerability and adaptation processes, including how

the resilience and incomes of some groups is related to the vulner-

ability of others through resource access, distribution and power

relations (Taylor, 2015). Alas, these uneven socio-political eco-

nomic relations are often overlooked (Bassett and Fogelman,

2013), with most studies focusing on adjusting to impacts. Vulner-

ability reduction also requires attention to the exercise of power in

relation to knowledge across scales. Interventions need to support

shifting actions and learning processes as new knowledge arises

and as adaptation and vulnerability patterns unfold. Yet, vulnera-

bility assessments carried out as part of project development are

often structured by predetermined indicators and approaches

developed elsewhere, reﬂecting the exercise of power within the

entire process. Thus, they do not adequately capture the social

and environmental processes that produce speciﬁc distributions

of vulnerability in a given place, such as the socio-political rela-

tions and processes through which particular groups are margina-

lised, including gender, race, age (dis)ability and class (Tschakert

et al., 2013; Nyborg and Nawab, 2017). In particular, vulnerability

assessments are often gender-blind, and thus run a high risk of vul-

nerability being redistributed or unequally exacerbated (Morchain

et al., 2015), as outlined in Section 2. Despite the prevalence of gen-

der strategies in various funding streams such as the Green Climate

Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and Global Environment Facility mech-

anisms, for example, gender sensitivity often takes the form of dis-

aggregating data by gender, but not actually designing

interventions to account for how gender shapes the exercise of

power (Persson & Remling, 2014). A recent review of the Adapta-

tion Fund also showed that less than half of surveyed Implement-

ing Entities, board members, Designated Authorities and NGOs

thought that policies and programmes sufﬁciently take into

account gender considerations (Adaptation Fund, 2019).

A further, underlying reason for the failure to understand and

monitor the evolution of vulnerability is insufﬁcient knowledge

and capacity at the various levels of project implementation. Adap-

tation is still a relatively new ﬁeld and its context- and scale-

speciﬁcity makes it difﬁcult for governments and NGOs to have

sufﬁcient dedicated expertise (Ojwang et al., 2017). Inadequate

understanding and an ignoring of the local vulnerability context

and drivers of vulnerability often pervade governmental, non-

governmental and development organisations tasked with funding,

planning and implementing adaptation interventions. This gap is,

in turn, both reﬂected in and reinforced by the projectisation of

adaptation initiatives, both by bilateral and multilateral donors

and through international adaptation ﬁnance (Mikulewicz,

2020b; Mikulewicz and Taylor, 2020). Outsourcing of different

components of project design, implementation and evaluation –

all taking place on different timeframes and with limited alloca-

tions – impedes optimal learning and rarely involves local and

international research expertise. The short time frames and the

(perceived) limited expertise within developing countries means

adaptation planning is often done as short-term consultancies,

with a high reliance on external experts and insufﬁcient local

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

involvement. Complicated application and evaluation procedures

also increase the reliance on external experts who know how to

negotiate the application process, but who may not have a deep

knowledge about the vulnerability context.

There is often little opportunity for critical analysis of how an

intervention may affect (or has affected) vulnerability, nor to inte-

grate lessons from past development successes and failures

(Horstmann, 2011; Remling and Persson, 2015). The competitive

project-based nature of funding exacerbates this problem: con-

ducting a comprehensive vulnerability assessment can be

resource-intensive, but is typically not budgeted, and incentives

to share information between organisations are almost nonexis-

tent. A political commitment to fund particular technical and

infrastructural interventions (such as climate services or reforesta-

tion) persists in the absence of compelling evidence for the positive

impacts of these interventions on vulnerability reduction, sustain-

ability, and institutionalisation. Climate change adaptation inter-

ventions would beneﬁt from compiling and integrating the

lessons learned of previous projects, to enable improvement

(West et al., 2018).

The subsequent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks

through which adaptation interventions are assessed are often

similarly ill equipped to assess whether or not vulnerability is

reinforced or redistributed by adaptation interventions. Rather

than interrogating the underlying drivers of vulnerability and

the longer-term qualitative dimensions of building resilience,

assessments and monitoring frameworks are often focused on

outputs (goods and services delivered; number of people tar-

geted) and value for money (Kaika, 2017). While the language

around adaptation interventions increasingly emphasises moni-

toring, evaluation and learning (MEL), the focus of M&E/MEL

remains on single-loop learning and assessing how well adapta-

tion activities are being implemented, rather than double- or

triple-loop learning, which questions the appropriateness of those

activities in the ﬁrst place and encompasses iterative, participa-

tory and action learning interactions (Argyris and Schön, 1978).

A focus on beneﬁciaries reached and the delivery and uptake of

intervention outputs means that M&E frameworks usually pay lit-

tle attention to longer-term outcomes or impacts as reﬂected in

the subsequent socio-political relations, resilience or well-being

of beneﬁciary populations, or indeed the impacts on non-

beneﬁciary populations.

This is due to a combination of factors. First, the fact that M&E is

overwhelmingly speciﬁc to individual interventions means that it

is carried out over timescales that are generally too short to inter-

rogate adaptation success in terms of longer-term outcomes and

impacts. Second, the normative and contested nature of what ‘suc-

cessful’ adaptation looks like (Dilling et al., 2019) means that there

is no agreement on what metrics to use to evaluate success. Some

have argued that ultimate purpose of adaptation is a normative

one: to sustain and enhance development performance and human

well-being in the face of climate change. In this view, adaptation

success ultimately should be measured – at the impact level –

using development and well-being metrics contextualised using

climate information (Barrett et al., 2020; Brooks et al., 2019). How-

ever, we follow others who have argued that indicators of success

in adaptation cannot be universal nor neutral, as success is histor-

ically contingent, normative and context speciﬁc (Moser and

Boykoff, 2014). Like vulnerability itself, what constitutes enhanced

development and well-being is bound up in the exercise of power

in contestations over authority, knowledges and identities. As such,

social and process-oriented indicators, which would be required to

dynamically monitor changes in vulnerability or resilience, are

complex, context-speciﬁc and therefore resource-intensive to

attempt to deﬁne and measure (Eriksen and Kelly, 2007; Brooks

and Fisher, 2014).

Finally, M&E frameworks tend not to fully interrogate any neg-

ative or unwanted outcomes of adaptation interventions. Report-

ing templates for adaptation M&E typically focus on effective

management of the planned activities, rather than identifying

potential negative impacts on areas, socio-political relations and

groups outside the sphere of control of the intervention

(Atteridge & Remling, 2018). Even at a technical level, tools do

not always ﬁt the climate context: for example, the Environmental

and Social Management Framework used by the World Bank and

Green Climate Fund aims to provide guidelines for screening pro-

jects to identify risk, but does not necessarily account for the

longer-term nature of climate risk. Maladaptation and the extent

to which measures ﬁt adaptation needs are key gaps in M&E frame-

works (Bours et al., 2013), along with the evaluation of how adap-

tation activities affect socio-political relations, resilience,

development performance and human well-being in the longer

term (Brooks et al., 2019).

3.2. Inequitable participation in planning and implementation of

interventions

A second key mechanism that weakens the way that vulnerabil-

ity is addressed is insufﬁcient participation by a range of margina-

lised groups in the design, planning and implementation of

adaptation interventions. Inclusive and representative participa-

tion is important to ground interventions in a sound understanding

of how multiple causes of vulnerability affect groups differently

(Forsyth, 2018). Equally important, political marginalisation

shapes vulnerability (and vice versa); hence the process of planning

and implementing adaptation measures needs to give space to

socio-politically marginalised and often invisible groups and their

needs in deliberating adaptation alternatives, in order to avoid

exacerbating marginalisation (Tschakert et al., 2013; Taylor,

2015; Nightingale, 2017).

Despite good intentions and provisions for participation, project

planning and management is often top-down, risking the genera-

tion of measures that exacerbate inequalities. Community-level

participation in planning, although often required, is frequently

problematic (Omukuti, 2020b). At worst, adaptation interventions

are legitimised through seemingly ‘participatory processes’, while

local communities and marginalised people have limited say over

the process through which the adaptation responses are framed

and deﬁned (Khatri, 2018; Mikulewicz, 2020b). When consulta-

tions do take place, the pressure to deliver quick results encour-

ages a reliance on existing governance institutions and following

established power relations, such that marginalized voices remain

unheard and existing inequalities are reinforced, including on the

basis of gender, literacy and caste (Nightingale, 2017; Mosberg

et al., 2017). Hence, many participatory climate change adaptation

policies and action plans exclude the most marginalised as a result

of their inherent power relations (Khatri, 2018; McNamara et al.,

2020; Omukuti, 2020b).

Experiences with learning in adaptation suggests that in order

for initiatives to foster real engagement, they must be designed

for openness to listen and learn from stakeholders as well as being

adaptive to distinct local contexts (Tschakert et al., 2016). Climate

interventions have often struggled to address the complexities and

power relations involved in ensuring participation and engage-

ment of marginalised groups, however. For example, NGO facilita-

tors of participatory processes are often aware of how power

relations inhibit active participation of the most marginalised,

but do not have the mandate to address these at the local or

broader levels, nor the tools to identify the causes of exclusion in

these interactions (Nagoda and Nightingale, 2017). Widely-used

participatory methodologies are similarly inadequate for overcom-

ing entrenched power relations at district level (Regmi et al., 2016).

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

Importantly, an uncritical focus on participation may disguise that

local actors are unable to ensure the meaningful inclusion of the

most marginalised.

3.3. Retroﬁtting adaptation into development assistance

As a consequence of insufﬁcient capacity, learning and partici-

pation processes in adaptation funding – as well as interests vested

in ongoing development agendas – there is a tendency to ‘retroﬁt’

or ‘rebrand’ existing development projects as adaptation efforts.

The complementary aims of adaptation and development, and

the rapid increase in funding available for the former, encourages

retroﬁtting of adaptation activities to ﬁt existing development

agendas. However, whilst related, adaptation and development

are not the same, with a major difference being that the former

addresses current and future climate risk and the socio-

environmental causes of vulnerability, which often demands a

rethink of how current development may in fact be producing vul-

nerability relations.

Finance intended for climate change adaptation often ends up

funding existing development activities that are simply rebranded

because they address climate-sensitive sectors or livelihoods

(Schipper et al., 2020a). As a result, they are not typically designed

with an emphasis on reducing vulnerability, or it is a secondary

goal overshadowed by a different environmental or development

goal. ‘Mainstreaming’, whereby adaptation needs are integrated

into an existing development portfolio, has been shown also to

have detrimental effects, as adaptation is often co-opted to support

existing development agendas rather than genuinely addressing

climate change risks (Scoville-Simonds et al., 2020). The two pro-

cesses hence dovetail as a form of retroﬁtting; existing develop-

ment activities are rebranded as adaptation and new adaptation

projects are co-opted to support existing development agendas.

Such retroﬁtting hinders addressing the root causes of vulnerabil-

ity, including changing those development paradigms, discourses,

interventions and related socio-political relations that produce

vulnerability.

Where existing development activities are simply rebranded as

adaptation, funding may serve to entrench unsustainable practices,

increasing vulnerability to climate change. The largest Public

Works Programme in the world, India’s Mahatma Gandhi National

Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), is one example of

development being rebranded as adaptation. Adam (2015) found

that the scheme provides an important ‘lifeline’ to livelihoods at

the margins, but misses opportunities to promote longer lasting,

transformative adaptation. For this to happen, the scheme’s proce-

dures and mechanisms would need to be tailored explicitly

towards adaptation, and not limited to the design of traditional

social security programmes. Such a reform has to be informed

through empirical research (e.g. contextual vulnerability assess-

ments), in addition to promoting awareness within departments,

and incorporating the climate-development interface at various

scales from local to national (Adam, 2015).

Retroﬁtting tends to lead to a focus on the ‘adaptation deﬁcit’

(the gap between current practices and the practices that would

be well adapted to existing climate hazards (Burton, 2004)) or per-

ceived immediate development needs rather than on what is

needed to address anticipated future risks or the social and envi-

ronmental causes of vulnerability. This means the vulnerability

context and the gravity of future climate risks may be underesti-

mated, potentially undermining adaptation to future climate

change (Dilling et al., 2015; Ojwang et al., 2017). Eriksen et al.

(2015) note that adaptation interventions have often taken the

form of supporting activities that largely deal with current climate

variability such as disaster risk reduction, social safety nets, water

management, ecosystems management, agricultural practices,

improved meteorological services and forecasting, micro-ﬁnance,

and index-based insurance. For example, a review of 56 activities

supported by the DFID StARCK+ programme in Kenya concluded

that some two thirds focused principally on familiar, existing risks,

and only a handful could be said to be explicitly and deliberately

targeting the (already observed) impacts of climate change

(Brooks, 2017).

Various institutional factors also act to impede the modiﬁcation

of development intentions into effective adaptation. The preoccu-

pation of donors with avoiding ‘double dipping’ of development

projects in adaptation funds means that they typically apply the

logic of additionality, whereby the adaptation ﬁnance covers the

additional costs of ‘climate prooﬁng’ a project (Stadelmann et al.,

2011). This approach is likely to favour incremental approaches

to adaptation that seek to protect and preserve existing systems

and practices, and inhibit the transformative adaptation that might

be required where current institutions and socio-political relations

are likely to be unviable in future and need to be radically modi-

ﬁed, replaced with alternatives, or abandoned altogether (Brooks

et al., 2019). At the same time, the longer-term viability of projects

is impeded by artiﬁcially drawn boundaries between activities

within climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and

achieving sustainable development goals. Although these ﬁelds

are closely linked, they are usually addressed by different local to

national level (government) departments and in particular through

different funding instruments, which means that the synergies

between activities are rarely maximized (Schipper et al., 2016). A

lack of communication and collaboration across organisations, pro-

jects and initiatives that are implementing adaptation activities in

similar regions may lead to duplication of adaptation efforts as

well as reducing the overall effectiveness of interventions and

undermining the potential for cross-sectoral and cross-

institutional learning.

3.4. ‘Adaptation success’ implicitly deﬁned by dominant development

agendas

Pervading all these three mechanisms is the tendency of pro-

jects to insufﬁciently conceptualise and evaluate what constitutes

‘adaptation success’ and how the meaning of such success varies

and is contested between different groups. The insufﬁcient engage-

ment with what ‘adaptation success’ looks like for a given inter-

vention is in part due to a lack of contextual understanding and

narrowly framed project-based monitoring and evaluation that is

more concerned with ensuring the project delivered what it

intended than with its broader impacts on vulnerability. But this

failure also reﬂects inequitable power relations and participation

processes in planning and implementation and how such skewed

processes come to make normative judgements of what constitutes

‘good’ adaptation . Employing a social justice interpretation of

adaptation, this paper highlights how adaptation actions are

always embedded within the exercise of power in socio-

environmental contexts. This interpretations suggestst that the

focus needs to be on reducing climate related risks and their social

production and unequal outcomes across groups, and shifting

socio-political relations that marginalise groups in decision-

making.

The space for real local participation in deﬁning ‘adaptation suc-

cess’ is often limited by the politics of funding and prevailing

development discourses, as well as an exclusion of local knowl-

edges. A fundamental challenge for participation is the fact that

dominant views within funding and implementing organisations

regarding what constitutes ‘good development’ implicitly or

explicitly frame the objectives of adaptation measures. These

pre-existing views and the organisational mandates of develop-

ment actors can limit real participation in deciding on project

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

objectives and design. For instance, Conservation Agriculture is

promoted as an environmentally and socially sustainable agricul-

tural development strategy in Zambia. However, in practice, envi-

ronmental and participation concerns are side-lined, and a new

green revolution is promoted with a focus on private sector-led

agricultural development (Westengen et al., 2018). Particular

development agendas are also reﬂected in the priorities of funding

mechanisms. For example, although 130 civil society organisations

participated in the design and development of the Green Climate

Fund, their values of civic environmentalism, which focused on

human rights and pro-poor climate ﬁnance, were undermined by

an overall emphasis on ﬁnancial and economic calculation

(Bruun, 2018). These examples reﬂect dominant preoccupations

with economic growth, efﬁciency and private sector commerciali-

sation. More fundamentally, the retroﬁtting of adaptation to serve

existing development agendas implicitly deﬁnes adaptation suc-

cess in relation to those agendas. The paradigm out of which adap-

tation is deﬁned – performed through planning, implementation,

monitoring and evaluation – determines what is justiﬁed as ‘good

adaptation’ within decision-making, which actors and interests are

heard, and which groups or options are silenced (Mikulewicz,

2020b).

The examples of top-down interventions and coercive liveli-

hood transformations described in Section 2.3 draw attention to

the dangers of enrolling adaptation into dominant development

discourses framed by ideas about modernity and progress. For

example, views that pastoralists need to undergo sedentarisation

because they are ‘backward’ and therefore need to modernise, as

expressed in the context of the Gambella case study discussed

above (Milman and Arsano, 2014), can be located ﬁrmly within

models of progressive social evolution rooted in Enlightenment

philosophical traditions originating in Western Europe and North

America. These models, involving the universal, progressive ‘ad-

vancement’ of human societies through a series of ﬁxed stages,

from hunting and gathering, through mobile pastoralism, to settled

societies and ﬁnally to cities and states (Sanderson, 1990), were

propagated through European colonialism (Olroyd, 1983; Cooper,

1997), and have been reproduced, modiﬁed and extended in the

ﬁelds of economics and development (Balakrishan et al., 2003).

Development models based on transitions from subsistence to

commercialisation, and transitions from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’,

market-based, services-driven, consumer societies, represent an

extension of these ideas (Cooper, 1997; Balakrishan et al., 2003).

While policies based on transitions to commercial farming can

beneﬁt smallholders if they address climate risks, protect tenure

and genuinely enhance livelihoods (see, for example, some of the

interventions under the StARCK+ programme described by

Brooks (2017)), they may also result in the further marginalisation

of vulnerable groups, for example if they favour the expansion of

larger commercial growers at the expense of smallholders, as

observed in Section 2.1.

In being co-opted by existing development agendas, adaptation

risks entrenching ideologically driven development models whose

core assumptions might be fundamentally at odds with vulnerabil-

ity reduction and support for marginalised groups. A key function

of adaptation should be to interrogate whether existing develop-

ment agendas involving the commercialisation of agriculture, the

expansion of certain services, the sedentarisation of pastoralists,

and other land use, land rights and livelihood transformations

are likely to reduce or enhance vulnerability (Mikulewicz, 2020a;

Webber & Donner, 2017). More fundamentally, adaptation inter-

ventions need to critically examine the validity of the implicit

(and sometimes explicit) assumptions about relationships between

development, modernity and progress. For example, while mobile

pastoralism is often seen as inimical to modernity, it evolved and

was propagated in Africa as a pragmatic response to rapid and sev-

ere climate change (Kuper & Kröpelin, 2006), and continues to pro-

vide an effective means of navigating climatic uncertainty and

variability (Krätli et al., 2013). With appropriate policies that facil-

itate mobility and allow pastoralists access to key resources, pas-

toralism has the potential to play a key role in adaptation, and

could replace sedentary agriculture in marginal areas where cli-

mate change makes the latter less viable in the future (Jones and

Thornton, 2009). In contrast, adaptation policies that result in the

involuntary sedentarisation of pastoralists, or the displacement

or loss of livelihoods of other marginalized groups, directly threa-

ten people’s tangible and intangible heritage and may exacerbate

vulnerability (Brooks, Clarke, Ngaruiya, & Wangui, 2020).

4. Avenues for strengthening vulnerability reduction in

adaptation efforts

The previous sections have identiﬁed how many current adap-

tation interventions reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnera-

bility as a result of (i) failing to understand the complexity of the

vulnerability context; (ii) inequitable stakeholder participation in

the design and implementation; (iii) retroﬁtting adaptation into

development assistance; and (iv) insufﬁcient conceptualisation

and evaluation of ‘adaptation success’. These shortcomings

together point to the multi-scalar nature of adaptation, combined

with how power and politics deﬁne adaptation practices, as signif-

icant factors in the failure of many adaptation interventions to

reduce vulnerability. Whether vulnerability is reinforced, redis-

tributed or created depends on the object and scale of analysis.

However, the issue of scale and knowledge is not just one of

whether location-speciﬁc project monitoring and evaluation cap-

tures negative effects elsewhere or at other spatial or time scales.

As we have shown in the previous section, the effects of adaptation

interventions are related to questions of adaptation for whom, who

is authorised to decide, whose problem framings and understand-

ings count, who decides whether adaptation is successful using

what criteria, and who is responsible for carrying out adaptation

activities in practice. Ideas of ‘adaptation success’ are normative,

contextual, and socially contingent; that is, they depend on whose

vulnerability and which risks are deemed acceptable or unaccept-

able and are therefore nested in the politics of deﬁnitional power

which are distinctly uneven between adaptation actors. These

actors – whether making adaptation decisions or being the target

of them – operate at different scales, as does their knowledge

(Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2018). Adaptation interventions are

imbued with the exercise of power in participation, deﬁnition,

scale and knowledge, often embodying a skewed politics that con-

tradicts the very goal of vulnerability reduction. For example, top-

down projects that authorize actors at international or national

levels (organisations or consultants) to govern adaptation or other

climate actions, while placing responsibility for carrying out such

actions at the local level (for example with small-scale farmers)

may both disempower and marginalise actors, exacerbating their

vulnerability (Arora-Jonsson et al., 2016; Schilling et al., 2017;

Scoville-Simonds et al., 2020). Here we review emerging literature

showing potential avenues for overcoming these challenges.

4.1. Shifting the terms of engagement with ‘local’ socio-political

vulnerability contexts

Over the course of the last decade, scholars and practitioners

have reﬂected on how the terms of engagement for vulnerability

reduction and adaptation intervention design can be shifted. In

particular, they emphasise the importance of: rethinking the

notion of ‘participatory’ design (i.e. addressing what participation

really means); ensuring that all relevant actors’ knowledge and

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

experience genuinely are as valued as those of so-called ‘experts’;

that all those engaged are respectful of ‘ownership’ to the process;

and, above all, of considering power relations – particularly in

regard to those who are at the receiving end of adaptation funding

(Ludi et al., 2014). Emerging literature explores tools such as delib-

erative dialogues and M&E (Ojha et al., 2020), underscoring that

until the diversity of worldviews and aspirations, including those

of science and local knowledge interactions (Jasanoff, 2003) are

taken into consideration, progress on adaptation will be limited.

An expanding literature shows the importance of recognising a

diversity in ways of understanding the world – ontological plural-

ism – for shifting the terms of engagement with local vulnerability

contexts (Klenk et al., 2017; Goldman et al., 2018; Nightingale

et al., 2020). This reﬂects the diverse interests, values, visions,

desired futures, and knowledges that shape who decides, and

whose values count, in making adaptation decisions, and how

these lead to differential effects of interventions. A key challenge

for efforts to shift socio-political relations is the tendency, as

described in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, for interventions to be increas-

ingly framed by the way that global actors, including consultants,

’experts’ and development organisations, understand the prob-

lems, needs and solutions as part of adaptation, while the adapta-

tion knowledge and needs of the most marginalised is rendered

invisible (Mikulewicz, 2020b). This biased valuing of knowledge,

and the privileging of certain cultural frameworks and norms as

if they are axiomatic, is a problem for developing effective mea-

sures, but more importantly, the process itself reinforces the social

and political exclusion that drive vulnerability to climate change in

the ﬁrst place.

Several authors highlight the transformative potential of knowl-

edge and learning processes as part of the adaptation process

(Tschakert et al., 2016; Ziervogel et al., 2016; Tran et al., 2020).

Ontological pluralism and justice in adaptation entails processes

of negotiation and contestation of development goals, knowledges

and norms between diverse actors and interests (Klenk et al., 2017;

Ziervogel et al., 2017). Engaging directly with contested and

diverse knowledges, and tackling the power dynamics inherent

in knowledge processes such as co-production, are identiﬁed as

key to building resilience. An expanding literature argues that it

is only through deliberating adaptation alternatives and opening

up space for the contestation of predominant development choices

and inequitable knowledge and authority relations that the socio-

political relations driving vulnerability can be transformed (Taylor,

2015; Eriksen et al., 2015; Nightingale, 2017; Kaika, 2017). Taking

an explicitly deliberative approach to adaptation means involving

a broader set of people than ‘experts’, ‘policy-makers’ and ‘local

leaders’ in decision making, strengthening the role of marginalised

people in deﬁning problems and solutions (Mees et al., 2014;

Goldman et al., 2018; Ojha et al., 2020). More fundamentally, delib-

eration involves going beyond stakeholder engagement to explic-

itly explore differential understandings, knowledges, values, and

political interests between groups related to what the causes of

vulnerability are and what constitutes ‘good development’, ‘adap-

tation’ or ‘transformation’ (Forsyth, 2019; Klenk et al., 2017). In

particular, challenging rather than perpetuating development

agendas and paradigms that marginalise populations is critical

for effective adaptation to take place (Mikulewicz and Taylor,

2020). Some promising examples exist: Ziervogel et al. (2016)

demonstrates how shifting from ‘strengthening the science–policy

interface to the knowledge–policy interface’ helped integrate

diverse knowledge forms and development interests within

municipal adaptation planning in South Africa (p. 455). Studying

the case of Little Andaman, Blackburn (2018) found that

community-based, rights-oriented education and advocacy pro-

grammes were potentially transformative for the ways local people

interact with the state because of their role in opening up space for

communities to critically reﬂect on state responsibilities, capaci-

ties, and weaknesses.

Importantly, ‘marginalised people’ are not a homogeneous

group: people’s interests, sources of vulnerability, and adaptation

knowledges differ (Lade et al., 2017). Hence shifting the terms of

engagement through ontological pluralism and learning spaces

entails engaging actively with this heterogeneity and the related

socio-political dynamics. Paying attention to the social context

means taking seriously the values, priorities, and worldviews of

marginalised groups. However, equally importantly, attention to

the social and political context means realising that the values, pri-

orities and worldviews will vary – and are continuously negotiated

– between (sub)groups of stakeholders affected by a given inter-

vention (Arifeen and Eriksen, 2020). This heterogeneity as well as

socio-political dynamics highlight why the common practice of

identifying ‘vulnerable groups’ and assuming that ‘communities’

are homogeneous entities when targeting adaptation investments

is deeply problematic (Titz et al., 2018). Speciﬁcally, intersectional-

ity – the way in which multiple subjectivities that divide social

groups interact to reinforce each other (including gender, race,

class and (dis)ability) – needs to be acknowledged and studied

(Nightingale, 2017). Thus, exploring gender or caste issues inde-

pendently of understanding how they come to reinforce each

other, can give a false understanding of the causes of vulnerability

(Carr & Owusu-Daaku, 2016; Ray-Bennett, 2009).

A speciﬁc entry point for operationalising the shifting of terms

of engagement with the vulnerability context is to ensure that all

stages of planning and implementation of interventions consis-

tently approach communities as heterogeneous in terms of values,

worldviews, priorities, power relations and livelihoods. This

involves, for example, M&E frameworks that use indicators that

are differentiated between groups, reﬂecting differences between

them in priorities, risks and impacts (rather than a uniform set of

indicators for all groups). Similarly, the social heterogeneity of

communities is critical in learning and deliberation processes, such

as how the power relations, institutional structures and cultural

norms that perpetuate gender, class, caste and ethnic discrimina-

tion in turn shape who has access to decision-making fora, whose

interests and values are represented, and whose voices are heard

and taken seriously (Figueiredo & Perkins, 2012; Tschakert et al.,

2016).

4.2. Broadening the focus from ‘local’ vulnerability to the global

context and multi-scalar processes producing vulnerability

Many of the shortcomings in efforts to reduce vulnerability

identiﬁed in this review relate to the fact that adaptation initiatives

address the observed symptoms of vulnerability, rather than the

cause (Scoville-Simonds et al., 2020). Moreover, they typically take

a spatially-restricted approach which further increases the risk

that reduction of vulnerability within that location may end up

redistributing it or reinforcing it elsewhere. Broadening the focus

from local vulnerability to the global context and multi-scalar pro-

cesses that drive and reinforce vulnerability opens up opportuni-

ties for identifying and addressing the root causes.

Taking a broader approach that considers how cultural and

socio-political contexts are entangled in processes across scales is

one way of making visible potential impacts that reinforce or redis-

tribute vulnerability beyond a project’s boundaries (Symons,

2014). In the context of agriculture, for example, Vermeulen

et al. (2018) have highlighted that there can be many opportunities

for transformation of practices, but these require an expansion of

the focus of adaptation planning in order to take the multi-

functionality of agriculture into account, as well as a system-

wide view of food production and consumption.

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

A key question, then, is how these proposed changes that shift

the terms of engagement with ‘local’ socio-political vulnerability

contexts and broaden the focus from ‘local’ vulnerability to the glo-

bal context and multi-scalar processes producing vulnerability can

take place? Adaptation has been highlighted as an opportunity to

rethink how we ‘do development’ in order to support more equita-

ble and sustainable ‘climate resilient development pathways’ and

confront, rather than sidestep, difﬁcult development issues

(Denton et al., 2014; Schipper et al., 2020b). However, to date,

adaptation has not altered the way that societies plan for the

future, but instead (at best) integrated a set of climate-related risks

into traditional planning approaches, often retroﬁtting existing

development interventions, as observed in Section 3. This suggests

that changes ‘at home’ and within existing development paradigms

may be required to engender transformation of the unjust develop-

ment pathways that produce climate change as well as inequality

and vulnerability (Lade et al., 2017). A critical implication of these

observations is that adaptation does not necessarily entail the need

for more expert knowledge to direct how marginalised groups

should transform their practices or knowledge; instead, it entails

shifting the knowledge and learning processes that take place

within implementing organisations, funding structures, and

research. Simply put: it is the adaptation organisations and experts

– rather than the marginalised people and their livelihoods – that

need to transform.

Recent literature suggests that an entry point for shifting how

organisations ‘do adaptation’ is to generate processes for learning

and reﬂection within aid organisations themselves, addressing fun-

damental barriers to learning such as lack of feedback and account-

ability. Rarely do we connect the critique of adaptation to asking

how learning takes place within organisations responsible for plan-

ning and implementing adaptation. Such learning spaces are

instrumental for enabling transformative measures (Tschakert

et al., 2016; Matin et al., 2018; Ojha et al., 2020). Fundamentally,

learning requires processes for obtaining feedback on the results

of actions taken, such as adaptation outcomes, as well as institu-

tional structures for ensuring accountability for those actions.

Development aid is particularly fraught with mechanisms and

uneven relations that impede feedback and accountability, and

thus learning (Eyben, 2005). Learning spaces are important

because, in the absence of a profound understanding of vulnerabil-

ity, resilience-building efforts run the risk of perpetuating prob-

lematic assumptions and marginalising the least entitled in

terms of assets and social relations (MacKinnon and Derickson,

2013).

Adaptation interventions are often focussed on achieving speci-

ﬁc targets and impacts in the short term (Mikulewicz, 2020a,

2020b). Far less time is spent reﬂecting on how projects are framed

and how expectations around outcomes are developed and how we

can Monitor, Evaluate and Learn (MEL) from approaches and pro-

jects. Creating mechanisms and spaces for reﬂection and question-

ing within implementing organisations regarding their own

assumptions around questions such as who is vulnerable and

why, what constitutes ‘good development’, what adaptation inter-

ventions are needed, and who can best make decisions about and

implement them, is a key vehicle for tuning in to the complexity

of climate adaptation and vulnerability reduction. An important

implication of the need for ontological pluralism and engaging

with marginalised groups as socially heterogeneous is the need

for adaptation processes to hold tensions and conﬂicting interests

– and to be transparent and just in decision-making. Are current

planning, implementation and MEL instruments designed to do

this?

However, learning and reﬂection need to go even further, and

question many of the fundamental and often unacknowledged

assumptions that underpin development. Pelling (2011) asks

whether development institutions, which are embedded in exist-

ing power relations and development logics, can address develop-

ment problems (including climate change) they have played a role

in creating. How can we address the fact that adaptation is embed-

ded in and largely supportive of existing power relations that have

caused the very problems adaptation ostensibly seeks to address?

Can the adaptation machinery step outside of, and challenge, these

relations? The above discussion suggests some possible entry

points for deeper reﬂection. For example, in academic circles, there

is a growing focus on transformative adaptation as the radical

restructuring, replacement or abandonment of systems and prac-

tices whose viability climate change throws into question. This

thinking is yet to penetrate into development practice, and raises

a number of very difﬁcult questions for development practitioners.

Nonetheless, it provides an entry point for challenging the wide-

spread assumption in practice that adaptation is about protecting

and preserving existing systems and enabling the continuation of

existing practices (IPCC, 2018; Brooks et al., 2019), and thus repre-

sents one avenue for addressing the retroﬁtting of adaptation to

existing development priorities. O’Brien (2018) argues that ques-

tioning predominant assumptions, beliefs and worldviews is a

key leverage point for transforming power relations and practices.

Adaptation practitioners might interrogate how dogmas of growth

and progress frame and drive actions that increase vulnerability,

and challenge the validity of such frameworks and their universal

application through a critical examination of their origins and

impacts on marginalised people (Brooks, Clarke, Ngaruiya, &

Wangui, 2020).

5. Conclusion: A post-adaptation turn?

The proliferation of adaptation projects around the world – and

the focus on marginalised groups that they represent – should be a

cause for celebration. Yet our review of climate change adaptation

interventions reveals that, contrary to common rhetoric, adapta-

tion does not necessarily reduce vulnerability. Indeed, there are

multiple ways in which adaptation efforts may instead increase,

redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. We have cate-

gorised the underlying mechanisms through which adaptation

efforts end up exacerbating vulnerability as relating to: the shallow

understanding of the vulnerability context; the inequitable nature

of stakeholder participation in the design and implementation of

adaptation; the retroﬁtting of adaptation into existing develop-

ment agendas; and lack of critical engagement with how ‘adapta-

tion success’ is deﬁned. A retroﬁtting hinders addressing the

socio-political causes of vulnerability; in addition, elite capture

and an ’accumulation by adaptation’ can widen inequalities. Our

review concludes that addressing these mechanisms demands a

rethink of how adaptation and development are done. In particular,

instead of designing projects to change the practices of margina-

lised populations, placing learning processes within organisations

and with marginalised populations at the centre of adaptation

objectives is key to shifting the terms of engagement and broaden-

ing the focus for successful and inclusive adaptation.

Our ﬁndings resonate with Thomas and Warner’s (2019) frame-

work of how people are made more vulnerable through climate

change adaptation, and reinforces the growing volume of work

on maladaptation (Antwi-Agyei, Dougill, Stringer, & Codjoe,

2018; Juhola, Glaas, Linnér, & Neset, 2016; Magnan et al., 2016;

Work, Rong, Song, & Scheidel, 2019). However, our ﬁndings go

beyond a maladaptation focus on unintended negative conse-

quences of adaptation measures, to suggest that adaptation inter-

ventions risk becoming tools for marginalisation and instruments

of abuse.

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

We argue that climate change adaptation has often repeated the

same patterns behind the principal failings of development assis-

tance since the end of the colonial era (Ferguson, 1990; Escobar,

1995; Ireland and McKinnon, 2013). This so-called post-

development critique is centred on the notion that a Western model

of development, especially development as ‘progress’ emerges as a

form of domination that repeats many of the patterns of colonial-

ism (Sultana, 2019). Yet, post-development as a movement has

been unable to reverse the unequal structures and institutions that

make up development assistance. Calls have been made for the

next generation of adaptation measures to move from incremental

and technical adaptation to transformation, where adaptation is

seen as a social change process which also entails transforming

systems and structures. Such adaptation requires paying close

attention to the paradigms we are in and addressing the underly-

ing causes of vulnerability and climate change (Pelling, 2011;

Denton et al., 2014; O’Brien, 2018). Our review echoes previous

ﬁndings that there are latent risks associated with decision-

makers translating the concept of transformation into policies

and practices if such processes are viewed as ‘‘apolitical, inevitable,

or universally beneﬁcial” (Blythe et al., 2018, p. 13). If stuck within

the same development paradigm that is in part generating vulner-

ability, interventions aimed at transformation risk having even

more adverse effects on marginalised populations than current

adaptation, such as through coercive transformation of people’s

livelihoods. Within such a conception of ‘transformation’, the mar-

ginalised become responsible for adapting to a climate change

problem created by others, adding insult to injury. Awareness of

these latent risks are therefore necessary along with recognition

of the political, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of trans-

formative adaptation (Blythe et al., 2018). Adaptation is increas-

ingly being scrutinized through a post-development lens,

emphasising that the mechanisms leading to the current failure

of adaptation interventions to reduce vulnerability need to be

addressed (Ireland and McKinnon, 2013; Mikulewicz and Taylor,

2020). Within current adaptation cum development paradigms,

inequitable terms of engagement with ‘vulnerable’ populations

are reproduced and the multi-scalar processes driving vulnerabil-

ity remain largely ignored. As a consequence, 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 the processes (re)pro-

ducing vulnerability. Post-adaptation is an appropriate term

because it mirrors the situation whereby development was shown

to be perpetuating colonialism – in this case post-adaptation refers

to the reproduction of power relations and poverty caused by

development projects, and reﬂects that we now have sufﬁcient

experience on the ground with adaptation to warrant a fresh start

with a different and more informed approach. First introduced by

Webber (2016), post-adaptation is a concept that has potential to

point to the risks of overly technocratic and Western-driven mod-

els of adaptation.

Such a post-adaptation turn has several implications for how

formal adaptation interventions are planned, implemented and

funded. First, vulnerability reduction cannot take place through

formal projects alone. A premise of this review, as mentioned at

the outset, is that planned adaptation interventions are only one

of many types of action – from daily livelihood actions, to corpo-

rate business decisions, civil society actions, and international

trade policy reform – that form part of the adaptation process. A

key issue, which the current COVID-19 pandemic has further high-

lighted, is how our collective futures are governed by a wide set of

shifts and disruptions, policies and decision-making processes,

beyond those concerning climate change. Hence adaptation

includes but is not contained within the realm – and the responsi-

bility – of government and aid organisations. However, adaptation

projects, despite their worrying track record to date, at the very

least provide some important lessons regarding how vulnerability

reduction can (or cannot) take place. The evidence suggests that

they may play a useful role in the adaptation process as arenas

for rethinking what good adaptation is, for whom, and how it

can be done differently to transform inequitable socio-political

relations and address marginalisation processes. If experimenta-

tion, collaboration, and deeper learning among adaptation actors

become a central goal of adaptation projects rather than delivering

measurable material outputs according to ‘development as usual’

standards, more equitable and lasting vulnerability reduction

may be possible.

Second, ontological pluralism and opening up the ownership of

adaptation knowledge to effectively include marginalised groups,

deliberation of conﬂicting interests and assumptions behind what

is legitimised as ‘good adaptation’ within currently dominant ide-

ological frameworks, as well as a close integration of learning,

research and practice within adaptation projects are key to achiev-

ing more inclusive and innovative adaptation interventions. This

observation, however, directs attention to the limits to radical

rethinking and redesigning that are possible within the current

adaptation-development apparatus. A key question is how funding

structures, power relations, and the organisation and implementa-

tion of adaptation interventions may open up or close down space

for reﬂective learning processes within organisations as well as

deliberative processes within projects.

Much of the research reviewed in this paper points out that

supporting adaptation in developing countries is anything but a

quick and easy ﬁx. This observation does not mean that adaptation

policy and interventions should not be carried out – they are crit-

ical to address the global inequality inherent in climate change

pointed out at the outset of this paper. Climate and adaptation

funding have led to much-needed investment in a number of crit-

ical sectors in developing countries, such as agriculture, infrastruc-

ture and health. There has, however, been little holistic or

connected understanding and learning about how such investment

may reduce, enhance, or redistribute vulnerability across scales. It

is our hope that the post-adaptation turn we call for can generate

renewed critical engagement – based on robust empirical insights

– with the multi-scalar politics of vulnerability and adaptation

interventions.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Siri Eriksen: Conceptualization (main); Methodology (main);

Writing – original draft (main); Writing - review and editing

(main); Project administration (main). Lisa Schipper: Conceptual-

ization (main); Methodology (main); Writing – original draft

(main); Writing - review and editing (main). Morgan Scoville-

Simonds: Conceptualization (main); Methodology (main); Writing

– original draft (main); Writing - review and editing (main).

Katharine Vincent: Conceptualization (main); Writing – original

draft (main); Writing - review and editing (main). Hans Nicolai

Adam: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original draft

(supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Nick

Brooks: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original draft

(supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Brian

Harding: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original draft

(supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Dil Kha-

tri: Writing - review and editing (supporting). Lutgart Lenaerts:

Methodology (main); Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing –

original draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (support-

ing). Diana Liverman: Writing - review and editing (supporting).

Megan Mills-Novoa: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing –

original draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (support-

S. Eriksen, E. Lisa F. Schipper, M. Scoville-Simonds et al. World Development 141 (2021) 105383

ing). Marianne Mosberg: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing

– original draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing. Synne

Movik: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original draft

(supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Benard

Muok: Writing - review and editing (supporting). Andrea Nightin-

gale: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original draft (sup-

porting); Writing - review and editing (supporting). Hemant Ojha:

Writing - review and editing (supporting). Linda Sygna: Conceptu-

alisation (supporting); Writing – original draft (supporting). Mar-

cus Taylor: Conceptualisation (supporting); Writing – original

draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting).

Coleen Vogel: Writing – original draft (supporting); Writing -

review and editing (supporting). Jennifer Joy West: Writing – orig-

inal draft (supporting); Writing - review and editing (supporting).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing ﬁnan-

cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared

to inﬂuence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this manuscript was submitted to the Nor-

wegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in December 2018 as a back-

ground paper in response to a request by the Norwegian Minister

of International Development to document how adaptation policy

and programmes are affecting vulnerability, including both posi-

tive and negative impacts. The considerable time and effort con-

tributed by 20 authors representing 24 institutions around the

world draw on the experiences and knowledge generated by

diverse research as well as adaptation interventions in which the

authors have been involved, either in design, implementation or

evaluation. While the writing largely took place through authors

volunteering their free time, our joint expertise emerges from a

multitude of past and present research projects, such as those

funded by the following grants: the Swedish Research Council

Development grant (#2015-03323) ‘‘Conﬂict, Violence and Envi-

ronmental Change: Investigating resource governance and legiti-

macy in transitional societies”; the Swiss National Science

Foundation grant (#168266) ‘‘Adapting to a changing discursive

climate”; the Research Council of Norway grant (#289957) ‘‘Trans-

formation as Praxis: Exploring Socially Just and Transdisciplinary

Pathways to Sustainability in Marginal Environments’

(TAPESTRY)”; the Research Council of Norway grant (#244551)

‘‘CiXPAG - Interaction of Climate Extremes, Air Pollution and

Agro-ecosystems”; the University of Arizona, US, Ofﬁce of Research

grant (#2107534); the National Science Foundation Geography and

Spatial Sciences Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research

Improvement Awards (#2002829); the Swedish Research Council

(VR) Sustainability and Resilience grant (#2018-05866) ‘‘Govern-

ing Climate Resilient Futures: gender, justice and conﬂict resolu-

tion in resource management (JUSTCLIME)”; the Research Council

of Norway grant (#250434/F10) ‘‘Adaptation: Combining Old and

New kNowledge to Enable Conscious Transformation to Sustain-

ability (AdaptationCONNECTS); and the Research Council of

Canada grant (#1232014-435). We would like to thank two anony-

mous reviewers for their useful comments. The views and perspec-

tives presented in this publication remain the responsibility of the

authors, however.

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Abstract