Making maladaptation work

Abstract

Maladaptation is a vital concept but needs to be wielded and operationalised in a more nuanced way. In this paper, we outline three conundrums for maladaptation and how they might be overcome to help ensure discourses of maladaptation advance positive adaptation action.

First, a blunt maladaptation discourse threatens to paralyse decision makers. The threat of being charged with maladaptation can make (bold) adaptation seem too hard, too risky, a threat to political capital – leading to safer, slower and less ambitious efforts.

Second, the assumptions that maladaptation can be known before implementation, that responsibility can be allocated, and that maladaptive outcomes can be prevented, all only hold true up to a point. While adaptation decision making can be evaluated against procedural criteria to encourage positive outcomes, the relationship between good decisions and good outcomes is not guaranteed. Experimentation is an important and necessary part of local adaptation, and any experiment may not work. Automatically marking such failures as maladaptation threatens to stymie necessary trial and error.

Third, as climate change rapidly unfolds ahead of adequate adaptation, climate impacts are combining with other challenges to undermine people’s capacity. As a concept, maladaptation is systemic in the sense that it pushes adaptees to consider future outcomes and effects on others. However, when it comes to attributing blame for maladaptation, a non-systemic perspective is adopted and the focus is typically on specific projects and those responsible for them, not wider forces. As a result, how maladaptation is wielded politically wastes its potential to help illuminate the wider, problematic systemic relations in which many decision makers are caught, including the changing climate itself.

How can these conundrums be overcome? We suggest two developments would assist.

First, there is a need to incorporate maladaptation into adaptation processes in a more precise way. We need a vocabulary and framework to distinguish between those aspects of adaptation that can be normatively assessed and are amenable to precautionary decision making, and those aspects that are unpredictable and need to be managed through careful M&E and adaptive management.

Second, as with the dominant frames of adaptation (climate risk management and vulnerability reduction), the concept of maladaptation currently offers only a deficit model of what is needed (less risk, less harm). To encourage stressed decision makers to act and overcome mounting delays to ambitious adaptation, the focus needs to shift from what to avoid, to what to aim for.