Adaptation bricolage: centering community agency in climate adaptation agendas

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A growing body of adaptation literature focuses on community resistance, a phenomenon whereby local people reject external interventions aimed at bolstering adaptation and/or resilience. While this is often considered as “adaptation failure” by development agencies, it may reflect a more complex reality. In this Viewpoint article, we engage an adaptation bricolage lens to examine a set of case studies of externally introduced adaptation in agriculture in Africa. This framework enables us to transcend the binary notion of acceptance vs. resistance and to unpack the complexity and dynamism of adaptation processes. The analysis indicates that externally driven adaptation interventions may yield unpredictable, but often appropriate and sustainable outcomes, when they encounter and engage with local knowledge, experiences, and priorities. Therefore, the design of adaptation policies and programs must take into account the role and context of community agency in shaping local engagement with externally introduced practices and technologies.