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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how community-led grassroots green infrastructures in the Netherlands, Japan, and Louisiana reshape climate adaptation, governance, and everyday life through locally attuned, experimental practices that challenge top-down solutions and foster alternative climate futures.

Paper long abstract

Our paper explores how community-based climate adaptation infrastructures reconfigure socio-political relations, environmental governance, and everyday life across three contrasting contexts: the Netherlands, Tokyo, Japan, and Louisiana, USA. Drawing from preliminary ethnographic research within the ERC-funded project Climate Citizenship, we examine how ordinary people materially and symbolically infrastructure climate change through green adaptation efforts such as oyster reef restoration, rain gardens, rice paddy dams, and urban farming. We understand community-driven green infrastructuring as a metabolic and relational process—one that operates in both tension and cooperation with established power relations and top-down solutions. Rather than approaching climate change adaptation as a technocratic fix, we analyze how community-driven projects emerge from everyday practices of care, multispecies collaboration, attunement and resilience, particularly in settings shaped by historical inequality and environmental injustice. For example, in Louisiana, climate change adaptation efforts are deeply entangled with racialized infrastructural legacies. In Japan, declining public investment is prompting a shift toward ecological solutions that address interconnected social and environmental challenges. Traditional landscapes, such as stone gardens and paddy fields, are being resignified as green infrastructure. In the Netherlands, a nation long governed by state-led water management, community-driven green infrastructures are provoking debates about civic responsibility and environmental governance. Across these contexts, we illuminate how adaptation is being reimagined through situated, collective efforts to create viable and just futures amid escalating ecological change. Rather than portraying community-driven climate adaptation as revolutionary, we examine how green infrastructure draws on local histories, traditions, and knowledge to reshape it.