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Paper short abstract

Adaptation M&E systems in international climate finance have built an established set of knowlege practices that ledn authority to the knowledge and render adapation governable but in doing so they close down the epistemic space for more transformative futures.

Paper long abstract

The success of adaptation action is under increasing global scrutiny and the use of monitoring and evaluation systems for adaptation is perceived to be a key part of the adaptation cycle. M&E frameworks define what success looks like and put in place the systems for data to be collected and reported to wider stakeholders. These systems are deployed in multiple sites and are managed and shaped by a transnational policy community who work across these spaces on internationally funded adaptation projects. In this paper we identify three key passage points where adaptation results are collated – multilateral climate funds, national programmes and individual projects – and identify a set of common knowledge practices that have become stabilised. We call these the institutional epistemologies of adaptation M&E. Multiple sites across the epistemic infrastructure of adaptation projects share certain practices that allow this knowledge to be seen as authoritative. These practices are designed to be consensual and show very limited disagreement around results. The M&E systems are not opening up wider debate on adaptation progress and success due to the limited public practices and abstract forms of knowledge generated through these practices. We conclude that the epistemologies of adaptation M&E create a decontextualised ‘view from nowhere’ that obscures the unknown elements of adaptation success that might be found through a combination of more divergent epistemologies. Whilst in principle M&E systems have the potential to generate learning and reflection, they are also political objects embedded in the power relationships of their contexts.

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Taking a pluralistic value-based approach to reflect the multiple relational subjectivities of Himalayan communities, the study explores the concept of invisible loss in the context of floods in Mustang and identifies the trade-offs that people engage in to prevent intolerable loss.

Paper long abstract

Conventional loss and damage frameworks remain limited in capturing grounded experiences of loss felt by communities, often overlooking the lived, intangible dimensions with deep psychosocial and cultural implications. While the term ‘non-economic’ has been emergent to convey such intangible aspects, invisible loss is a more suited concept as it refrains from market-based conceptualisations of loss (i.e., economic and non-economic) and is more attuned to the prevalent power dynamics vis-a-vis the notion of visibility. Taking a pluralistic value-based approach to reflect the multiple relational subjectivities of Himalayan communities, the study explores the concept of invisible loss in the context of floods in Mustang and identifies the trade-offs that people engage in to prevent intolerable loss. Comparative findings reveal how Lubrak, being an isolated settlement, experienced greater cultural losses while Kagbeni, influenced by tourism and modernisation, faced tensions between maintaining traditions and adapting to socioeconomic changes. While this reflects a core-periphery dynamic, emotional losses, particularly a diminished sense of place and identity, were central across both communities. The presentation concludes with a reflection on the dilemma of quantifying such losses, particularly when equity and justice considerations in today’s context translates to delivering funds to the affected communities.

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Who defines “loss” in Loss & Damage? The Fund’s rules privilege measurable harms and expert models, sidelining cultural, relational, and Indigenous losses. This technocratic filter reproduces epistemic inequality; justice requires communities defining loss on their own terms.

Paper long abstract

As Loss and Damage (L&D) becomes part of formal climate policy, the key question is simple: who gets to decide what counts as loss? This paper demonstrates how the current design of the L&D Fund transforms a demand for justice and repair into a technical process governed by forms, metrics, and financial rules. Economic models, risk assessments, and attribution thresholds ultimately determine whose suffering is considered “valid.” Losses that are not easily measured—such as the destruction of culture, displacement from ancestral land, or harm to relationships with nature—are pushed aside because they do not fit institutional templates or funding tools.

Using fund documents, negotiation records, and early access rules, the paper shows how decision-making power concentrates in development banks, consultants, and scientific institutions. Their expertise often overrides how affected communities and Indigenous peoples understand loss: not just as economic damage, but as historical, collective, and tied to identity and land.

The paper warns that this approach risks repeating colonial patterns of knowledge and recognition. It ends by suggesting concrete alternatives: methods of valuing loss rooted in local realities, shared decision-making over evidence, and governance models that support community autonomy rather than donor-driven conditions.

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This paper argues, through narrative accounts from Northeast India, that non-economic loss becomes legible through situated ways of knowing that lie outside formal L&D systems and that these peripheral perspectives unsettle institutional understandings of Loss and Damage.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how non-economic Loss and Damage (NELD) can be understood in regions where it is not an established governance category. Using Northeast India as a case, it analyses the narrative and epistemic practices through which loss becomes recognisable. Rather than treating L&D as a technical field, the paper studies how dispersed accounts in media, platformed digital materials and oral accounts of environmental change come together to form vernacular registers of loss. These registers describe harms that dominant policy frameworks overlook. They point to land eroded without formal recognition, species and forest elements that no longer return, rivers that change course in ways that unsettle livelihoods, and disruptions in relations between people, soils, water, and nonhuman beings.

By analysing how environmental change is described through altered relations with landscapes and ecological processes, the paper shows that loss reflects structural conditions of vulnerability that formal L&D categories struggle to acknowledge. These accounts map responsibility in ways that diverge from institutional assessments and point to infrastructural decisions, extractive activity, and state neglect as drivers of slow and acute damage.

The paper argues that these vernacular loss registers expose the epistemic limits of climate governance, particularly its reliance on quantification and legally recognisable impacts. Narrative practices operate as political claims-making, producing their own criteria of evidence, accountability, and repair. Studying these registers provides a grounded basis for understanding how L&D is articulated at the peripheries of climate governance, before and beyond institutional recognition.

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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a “foreclosed futures” framework to advance L and D epistemically and politically. This framework shifts the core question from “what was lost?” to “what can now never be?” recentring analysis on biographical life plans and extinct possible futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that institutionalised Loss and Damage (L and D) mechanisms reproduce epistemic injustice by privileging technocratic, retrospective accounting. This approach systematically overlooks how disasters extinguish vulnerable people’s intimate hopes, aspirations, and planned futures. I propose a “foreclosed futures” framework to advance L and D epistemically and politically. This framework shifts the core question from “what was lost?” to “what can now never be?” recentring analysis on biographical life plans and extinct possible futures. Understanding foreclosed futures demands “desire-based” (Tuck 2009) biographical methods that recast climate-affected peoples as future-oriented agents and makes visible how disasters erase personal life trajectories. A foreclosed futures approach reframes the slow attrition of life plans as a form of structural temporal injustice, questioning whose futures were deemed disposable and how they were ‘disposed of’ in post-disaster contexts. Finally, by empirically documenting which futures are closed for whom it provides a targeted critique of the systems that actively cancel futures, revealing that such foreclosure is not inevitable.

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In this article, we examine a critical case from Norway of two wind farms built on the traditional reindeer herding land of the indigenous Sámi people. We analyse epistemic injustices enacted through State-led governance and the counter conducts employed by Sámi actors.

Paper long abstract

Sultana (2025) argues that an underappreciated dimension of climate change loss and damages arises from epistemic injustices, such as the devaluing of indigenous knowledges and ontologies, and suppression of the voice and agency of indigenous people. Within this context, we examine a critical case from Norway of two wind farms built on the traditional reindeer herding land of the indigenous Sámi people. In 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, determined the State had breached internal law protecting the cultures of indigenous people by granting planning concession for these wind farms. Drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of power/knowledge and counter conducts, we consider how climate coloniality was enacted in this case, epistemically through State-led governance and power asymmetries. We then examine counter conducts employed by Sámi actors, which included commissioning their own cumulative impact assessment, led by a Sámi consultancy team, demonstrations outside the national parliament by a Sámi youth group, and advocating for engagement missions by UN expert groups on human rights. The counter conducts repoliticised the case and the (in)actions of the Norwegian State, generating considerable media interest that ultimately led to a formal apology being issued by the government to the Sami reindeer herders. Nevertheless, broader governance questions about the Sámi people rights to their traditional land and the implementation of key commitments in international law, particularly the right to free informed prior consent, remain unresolved. We conclude with observations on decolonializing Norwegian energy and climate governance domestically, and on potential international implications and lessons.

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Paper short abstract

Inter-local cooperation is often seen as an administrative tool. This paper reframes inter-LGU alliances as epistemic actors that produce territorial climate knowledge excluded by technocratic climate governance, with implications for climate justice and Loss and Damage.

Paper long abstract

As climate governance becomes increasingly institutionalised through adaptation and Loss and Damage mechanisms, authority over climate knowledge has consolidated within technocratic systems that privilege standardized metrics, expert-led assessments, and nationally mediated funding architectures. These arrangements marginalize territorially grounded and collectively produced forms of knowledge, raising critical questions of epistemic justice.

Drawing on long-term research on inter-local cooperation (ILC) among local governments in the Philippines, this paper conceptualizes inter-LGU alliances not merely as coordination mechanisms but as epistemic actors. Through joint planning, shared risk assessment, and area-based governance across ecological and jurisdictional boundaries, ILCs generate territorial knowledge of climate risk, loss, and response that is relational, historically situated, and politically negotiated.

Despite their relevance, such knowledge remains largely illegible within dominant climate governance and climate finance frameworks, particularly Loss and Damage architectures that prioritize projectized, quantifiable, and externally validated evidence. This disjuncture constitutes an epistemic rupture between how climate impacts are governed at the subnational level and how justice claims are recognized internationally.

By reframing inter-local cooperation as a site of epistemic intervention, the paper contributes to debates on climate justice, decentralization, and epistemic authority in the Global South. It argues that recognizing territorial governance institutions as legitimate knowledge producers is essential to advancing more plural, just, and transformative climate futures.

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Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami under the banner of disaster risk reduction large scale integrated resettlement site were developed in the coastal city of Chennai in India. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research conducted nearly two decades after the tsunami, this paper demonstrates how such post-disaster resettlement has, over time, produced new and uneven layers of risks.

The findings show that technocratic, top-down recovery and resettlement processes have generated long-term vulnerabilities through spatial segregation, ecological disregard, institutional incapacity, and political decision-making shaped by elite interests. Rather than reducing risk, these interventions have reconfigured it in ways that disproportionately affect already marginalised populations. The paper highlights how women and gender minorities were particularly affected due to failure in recognising the socio-cultural practices, livelihood systems, and everyday forms of care in the long term recovery processes. At the same time, this research demonstrates that affected communities are not just passive recipients of state-led adaptation and recovery. They actively engage in making the spaces viable through incremental housing extensions, everyday solidarities, and practices of resistance. These practices directly challenge dominant technocratic framing of disaster recovery and adaptation.

By situating peripheral resettlement as a site for disaster recovery, this paper argues that disaster-induced recovery must move beyond expert-driven models to centre community-led, embodied, and relational knowledge as fundamental to climate justice. .

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Paper short abstract

This conceptual paper examines how accountability in rural climate adaptation operates as a mode of authority rather than empowerment, showing how social ties, selective transparency, and mediated communication organise responsibility while constraining influence.

Paper long abstract

This conceptual paper examines how accountability in rural climate adaptation can operate as a mode of authority rather than as a pathway to empowerment. Adaptation initiatives frequently frame accountability in terms of participation, transparency, and community responsibility. However, these arrangements often organise behaviour and expectations in ways that stabilise institutional control. Drawing on debates in adaptation governance, social capital, and transparency scholarship, the paper develops an accountability-as-authority framework to explain how responsibility is produced, distributed, and legitimised within adaptation interventions.

The paper argues that accountability is shaped through social relations, selective information sharing, and mediated communication. Bonding ties within community groups support cooperation and mutual oversight, yet they can also reinforce conformity with priorities set outside the community. Transparency often focuses on technical and operational information while leaving strategic and financial decisions beyond scrutiny. Communication is channelled through intermediaries who filter concerns and shape how participation is expressed and understood. These dynamics create accountability arrangements that rely on community involvement while limiting opportunities for influence or contestation.

By conceptualising accountability as a political process rather than a neutral mechanism, the paper contributes to wider debates on power, participation, and governance in climate adaptation. It highlights how accountability can sustain project outcomes while narrowing the scope of agency available to communities. The paper concludes by reflecting on how adaptation governance might be re-imagined in ways that align responsibility with meaningful influence over decision-making.

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Paper short abstract

This paper interrogates projectized adaptation as epistemological violence and advances an alternative grounded in autonomous design. Drawing on work in a Himalayan village, it argues for reorienting adaptation and L&D toward community-led worldmaking.

Paper long abstract

This paper interrogates the “project” as a dominant logic of climate adaptation and argues that projectized adaptation constitutes a form of epistemological violence within contemporary climate governance. Adaptation, institutionalised by the development apparatus, is shaped by the logic of the project: constrained in scope by international funding calls or geopolitics while framed according to institutional timelines and imported expertise. Projectized adaptation is epistemologically violent, privileging technocratic knowledge and projectized adaptation packaged as neatly bounded interventions. It also precludes the emergence of grounded, always-ongoing adaptation guided by other forms of knowledge.

In response, the paper considers what forms of adaptation practice and L&D outcomes might come from reorienting away from the project’s epistemological violence. Drawing on concepts like autonomous design, this epistemic reversal centers situated, experiential knowledges and the emergent practices they engender. The paper makes this argument by considering ongoing work in a small Himalayan village that is gradually retreating uphill in response to climate crisis-driven flooding. First, it frames adaptation in the village as part of a continuum of environmental migration amidst abandonment by the state that would be interrupted by the imposition of projectized adaptation. Second, it outlines how a small design team responds to this framing by providing resources to make space for the community’s ongoing adaptive retreat. Finally, drawing on the example of this practice, the paper argues for a reorientation of institutional adaptation practice and L&D priorities toward making space for agential, emergent, community-led worldmaking.

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Paper short abstract

Despite many participatory adaptation projects in Semarang, communities remain precarious. Drawing on the concept of anti-politics machine, this paper argues transformative adaptation requires not better participation, but strategic navigation across development discourse toward just redistribution.

Paper long abstract

Despite many environment-related development projects in Semarang increasingly incorporating participatory and inclusive values, coastal communities in the ‘sinking city’ of Semarang, Indonesia and its surrounding areas remain submerged in deepening socio-ecological precarity. Given that literature on transformative adaptation argues that meaningful participation is needed to realize transformation, and participation is everywhere in environment-related development projects, then why is transformation not happening? Drawing on the concept of anti-politics machine, this research explores how participatory politics operates across development discourse boundaries in Semarang's environmental governance landscape and how this shapes adaptation strategies. Data was collected from interviews with stakeholders, including NGO workers, academics, activists, and impacted communities, and analyzed using analytic reflexivity. Findings reveal three mechanisms that constrain transformative adaptation: development apparatus channels community involvement toward resilience-level adaptation that do not address root causes of vulnerability; aspirations for transformative adaptation bring repression to communities when enacted outside ‘acceptable’ development discourse; and expert-subject relations from development projects leak into political organizing spaces. However, development discourse also creates gaps that actors strategically navigate to pursue their aspirations for transformative adaptation. As Semarang and surrounding coastal areas are on the verge of sinking, this research suggests transformative adaptation requires not better participation within development projects, but strategic navigation across discursive boundaries — picking the right battles before the tide rises further.

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This paper examines adaptive water governance in Ladakh to show how climate uncertainty is governed through contested forms of knowledge and authority, highlighting interactions between state-led adaptation frameworks and community-based water practices in a high-altitude, climate-vulnerable region.

Paper long abstract

Climate change adaptation is often approached as a technical and managerial challenge, privileging expert-driven frameworks and standardised policy tools. This paper reframes adaptation as a governance process shaped by uncertainty, authority, and contested knowledge. Focusing on adaptive water governance in Ladakh, a high-altitude and climate-vulnerable borderland region, it examines how climate uncertainty is governed through interactions between state-led adaptation initiatives and historically embedded community water practices.

Drawing on field-based research and policy analysis, the paper examines how different forms of knowledge are mobilised, translated, and prioritised within formal governance arrangements. Rather than treating community-based knowledge as either marginal or inherently emancipatory, it critically examines how such knowledge is selectively recognised within technocratic adaptation frameworks, shaping decision-making authority and producing uneven governance outcomes. These interactions generate hybrid institutional arrangements characterised by ongoing negotiation rather than stable or coherent adaptation pathways.

By situating adaptive water governance within broader debates on knowledge, authority, and climate justice, the paper contributes to development studies scholarship on governing uncertainty in marginal and environmentally sensitive regions. It demonstrates how dominant adaptation models often obscure the political dimensions of knowledge use, while community-based practices continue to influence governance without fundamentally reshaping authority structures. The Ladakh case challenges universalist assumptions about climate adaptation and underscores the importance of examining how power and legitimacy are constituted through adaptation governance in the Global South.

Keywords:

Climate uncertainty, adaptive water governance, knowledge and authority, climate justice, Global South, environmental governance.

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Paper short abstract

Adaptation relies on the commons in Nepal, raising challenges for participation and distributive justice. How do placed-based commoners gain access to decision making at other scales? How do top-down actors shape who and how people get access to compensation funds?

Paper long abstract

Adaptation is now well established as a political, contested process, but how common people engage in adaptation governance is less well understood. More of the conversation is about which authorities, at which levels should be making what kind of decisions. Yet in places like Nepal, compensation funds have been earmarked for people at the grassroots. In November, 2025, Nepal was paid USD 9.4 million from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) for documented sequestration of carbon dioxide in forests. A forest department official assured me these funds were only to be paid out to the communities that had done the hard work of both conserving forests and monitoring them. While this is laudable, the same official threw up his hands and said, “that has to be worked out, we are developing criteria” when I asked how they were going to assure the money was not simply captured by elites. In this paper, I use the example of Nepal to revisit questions of participation and distributive justice within the commons. How do people at the grassroots gain access to decision making at other scales when user-groups are conceived as place-based? What are the consequences of top-down actors shaping who and how people get access to compensation funds? These questions become more contentious as development aid is unceremoniously eliminated overnight by major donors—donors who were deeply involved in implementing carbon sequestration schemes and promoting participatory resource governance at the grassroots, contributing to uncertainty in the commons.

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This paper examines how climate refugees, excluded by law and exposed to environmental crises, reveal shared vulnerability. It further proposes relational agency as frameworks for a more inclusive and interdependent vision of justice across human and morethan human worlds.

Paper long abstract

Human climate refugees face an uphill battle from the outset, beginning with the contest over the term itself. Their legal and political status remains undefined, caught between national and international frameworks that fail to recognise their existence. Their displacement exposes the limits of humanitarian and legal protection, rendering them outside the bounds of anthropos and the privileges of anthropocentrism. The uncertainty surrounding climate refugees reveals a dual pressure from both state authority and environmental forces, resulting in a condition of rightlessness. Through Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of State of Exception and Homo Sacer, climate refugees can be understood as embodying a form of bare life, stripped of rights by sovereign mechanisms of control. An examination of Amitav Ghosh’s "Gun Island," alongside historical and policy discourses, demonstrates how state systems perpetuate vulnerability and suppress refugee agency. Building on the critical insights of New Materialism, this paper develops a framework of relational agency that recognises the interconnected vulnerabilities of climate change refugees covering both human and nonhuman entities. The concept of “ethico-cosmopolitical hospitality,” drawn from Derrida’s ethics of absolute justice, is proposed as a way to reimagine development in terms of inclusivity, shared responsibility, and collective agency.

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Adaptation in the Paris Agreements Global Stocktake (GST) is governed through technocratic logics that marginalise political and local knowledges. This study shows how epistemic and structural power shape outcomes and argues for a more deliberative, justice-oriented GST.

Paper long abstract

The Global Stocktake (GST) of the Paris Agreement is often portrayed as a technocratic mechanism to assess collective progress on climate action. Yet, beyond its procedural role, the GST constitutes a key site where norms, knowledge, and authority in global climate governance are negotiated. This article examines how adaptation is governed through the first GST, revealing how epistemic and structural power shape what counts as legitimate adaptation knowledge and action. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with UNFCCC negotiators, national policymakers, and civil society actors, the study analyses how adaptation was discursively constructed, interpreted, and institutionalised across the technical and political phases of the GST. The findings show that adaptation was largely framed as a managerial and measurable process of planning and reporting, mirroring the concurrent Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) negotiations, while deeper distributive and political dimensions of vulnerability were sidelined. Despite providing limited political signals, most notably the call for national adaptation plans by 2025, the GST’s design and implementation reinforced hierarchies privileging mitigation over adaptation and technocratic expertise over plural knowledges. The article argues that the GST’s potential to advance adaptation lies less in refining indicators than in fostering deliberation, inclusivity, and accountability for the structural drivers of vulnerability. By reframing the GST as a deliberative and inclusive process, the study identifies concrete pathways for enhancing the political relevance and legitimacy of global adaptation governance in future stocktake cycles.

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Climate adaptation falls short due to outdated assumptions and entrenched habits that no longer fit a changed risk landscape. We propose unlearning—the intentional discarding of obsolete ideas, epistemologies, practices—as a critical but overlooked mechanism for equitable transformation.

Paper long abstract

Climate adaptation has yielded mixed results: billion-dollar disasters continue to mount, vulnerability remains entrenched, and piecemeal solutions risk maladaptation. This paper argues that unlearning—the intentional process of discarding misaligned knowledge, entrenched routines, and inherited worldviews—is a critical yet overlooked mechanism for transformative climate adaptation. While adaptation centres learning, innovation, and adaptive capacity, these additive approaches are constrained by what organizations and societies refuse to relinquish. Drawing on interdisciplinary work in organizational theory, psychology, cognitive science, and education, we conceptualize unlearning as a subtractive, retrospective, and discontinuous process that enables a break from maladaptive trajectories.

We propose a four-pillar analytical framework—Reconsidering, Discarding, Realignment, and Merging—to illuminate the diverse ways unlearning operates across epistemic, normative, technical, and integrative dimensions of adaptation. This framework is situated along a Continuum of Change that distinguishes between incremental versus disruptive shifts, and cognitive-philosophical versus technical-operational transformations. Through case vignettes—from wildfire management informed by Indigenous fire knowledge to post-Katrina risk governance reforms and the Netherlands’ Room for the River program—we demonstrate how unlearning has the potential to drive systemic change in practice.

We argue that identifying, enabling, and institutionalizing unlearning is essential for climate governance, especially amid nonstationarity, compounding risks, and escalating inequality. The paper outlines methodological pathways for empirically studying unlearning in adaptation settings and offers practical tools such as sunset provisions, unlearning audits, and deliberative challenge processes. By foregrounding unlearning as a deliberate step—not a by-product—we show how climate governance can move beyond incremental adjustments toward equitable, resilient, and transformative futures.