It is well known that climate change impacts are experienced unevenly by different individuals and groups. Intersectional feminist scholarship offers important insights into these differences but is often seen as too theoretical to be easily applied. Processes to support adaptation planning and action at local levels are evolving to better account for social and cultural dimensions, including by measuring adaptive capacity of social systems. However, these advances are incremental, and planning tools tend to remain focused on physical and economic impacts of climate change. Following principles of transdisciplinary research and using an intersectional lens, this dissertation examines the co-development and implementation of a community adaptation planning process that was place-based, built on local cultural knowledge, and tailored to the needs, interests, and priorities of local people. The work was conducted in partnership with Tsáá? Çhé Ne Dane, the people who comprise Doig River First Nation located on Treaty 8 Territory in northeastern British Columbia, Canada. Diverse methods were employed for broad engagement with community participants. These included semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, public community meetings, a customized adaptive capacity assessment questionnaire, and core team workshops to ensure collaborative project decision-making. The research identified four social dimensions––culture, age, gender, and spirituality––as particularly salient to local peoples’ understandings of and responses to environmental change. Attention to these key dimensions throughout the research process helped to illuminate areas of divergence and congruence among social groups within the community and informed changes to the research design, including decision-making about project framing, methods, and outputs. One of the key outputs of this approach was a customized process for ongoing planning in the Doig River First Nation community. This dissertation presents the resulting plan and process and offers analysis of how transdisciplinary methodologies can serve to translate intersectionality theory into concrete local actions in this context. This research responds to calls for climate adaptation processes that are bottom-up, strength-based, pluralistic, and flexible. It argues that embedding opportunities for individual and collective reflexive practice into transdisciplinary research can make these processes more effective by supporting transformative learning, which is necessary for sustainability transformations.
Michaela Sidloski (Thu,) studied this question.