Abstract
Abstract. The measures implemented to adapt to climate change are primarily designed to address the tangible, biophysical impacts of climate change in a given geographic area. They rarely consider the wider social implications of climate change, nor the politics of adaptation planning and its outcomes. Given the necessity of significant investment in adaptation over years to come, adaptation planning and implementation will need to place greater concern on justice-sensitive approaches to avoid exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and creating maladaptive and conflicting outcomes. Building on recent calls for more just and transformative adaptation planning, this paper offers a flexible analytical framework for integrating theories of justice and transformation into research on climate change adaptation. We discuss adaptation planning as an inherently normative and political process linked to issues pertaining to recognition justice as well as distributional and procedural aspects of justice. The paper aims to contribute to the growing discussion on just adaptation by intersecting theoretical justice dimensions with spatial, temporal and socio-political challenges and choices that arise as part of adaptation planning processes. A focus on justice-sensitive adaptation planning not only provides opportunities for examining spatial as well as temporal justice issues in relation to planning and decision-making processes. It also paves the way for a more critical approach to adaptation planning that acknowledges the need for institutional restructuring and offers steps towards alternative futures under climate change conditions.
Highlights
Developing a better understanding of the justice implications of adaptation planning and decision-making is becoming a pressing ethical responsibility
It is pivotal to bring out the political nature of adaptation processes, where much is at stake for those threatened by climate change risks and those experiencing positive and negative outcomes of adaptation efforts
We have maintained a view that examining the spatial, temporal and socio-political ramifications of adaptation planning is a critical precondition for developing more justice-sensitive ways for tackling the impacts of climate change
Summary
Developing a better understanding of the justice implications of adaptation planning and decision-making is becoming a pressing ethical responsibility. In order to examine the justice implications of adapting to climate change, we explicitly refer to adaptation planning, rather than planned adaptation or adaptation, as a way of focusing in on the process-related and at the same time normative character of individuals and groups actively engaging in making deliberate, spatially and temporally contextualized decisions. This emphasis is to highlight that adaptation is about substance as well as about process: the substantive need for adaptation planning arises from the global climate crisis and its future socio-ecological ramifications as increasingly material climate change impacts threaten ever more aspects of human and non-human life. This categorization, can only be an analytical one, as all three dimensions are mutually constitutive, rendering adaptation planning a diverse and heterogenous praxis
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