The Discursive Politics of Adaptation to Climate Change

Adaptation to climate change is a policy objective of rapidly growing importance for development programming across the Global South. This article offers an interrogation of the discursive politics surrounding the term based on insights from postcolonial theory. By employing a theoretical framework rooted in the concepts of imaginative geographies and discursive violence, this contribution seeks to deconstruct how adaptation is being imagined and promoted by development actors in a Global South context. The underlying study adopts a multisited, institutional ethnography to critically analyze an adaptation project in São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) implemented jointly by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the national government. The article presents evidence for how agents of development (re)produce an imaginative geography of the country’s vulnerability and engage in a discursive violence that renders project beneficiaries vulnerable on the one hand, and seeks to transform them into model adaptation subjects on the other. It discusses how local residents have been effectively excluded from the project based on their perceived vulnerabilities and points to critical political theory and “imaginative countergeographies” as ways in which the disempowering representations of the Global South as vulnerable and the discursive violence committed against its residents can be counteracted.