Material Climate Justice: Connecting Social Equity and Climate Risk in Urban Climate Adaptation

Abstract

Climate reports underscore the differential impact of climate change risks for marginalized communities— women, people of color, indigenous communities, the disabled, and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations—and the need to recognize and address inequities in climate adaptation processes. To date, scholarship on climate adaptation in organization and management scholarship focuses on firm-level and empirical work has failed to account for the complexity and materiality of socio-ecological systems, historical processes that structure inequity, and the agency of actors within adaptation processes. To address this, we develop a material climate justice framework by extending conceptual links between risk, material feminism, and justice. The material climate justice lens combines climate justice (CJ) insights about political economic processes that distribute risks and rewards in the urban context and the materiality of differentially embodied exposures to risks, resources, and political advantages. We describe the ways representatives of marginalized groups practice agency in climate adaptation processes that are primarily being driven by government agencies in consultation with business, academic, and consulting groups. Findings suggest that representatives of marginalized populations engage in sub-processes to impact climate adaptation that expand notions of climate risk to include embodied experience connected to resources, representation, histories, place and future embodied experiences.