Contribution short abstract

Starting from a critique of the commons approach, I explore the re-appropriation of customary norms for fisheries and forestry management by Niominka women and young people in the Saloum delta in Senegal.

Contribution long abstract

This article explores how climate change adaptation can be re-envisioned through the ontological and decolonial turning points, using the Niominka communities of the Saloum Delta in Senegal as an empirical lens. While global environmental governance—structured by multilateral conventions and national legal frameworks—tends to standardize adaptation policies, local societies continue to mobilize relational ontologies and customary norms that shape their interactions with the commons. The Niominka case illustrates how pre-colonial modes of regulating shared resources contain culturally embedded principles of sustainability, deeply rooted in a cosmology that blurs the boundaries between humans, non-humans, and the environment. However, these endogenous practices now coexist with, and are often overshadowed by, state-driven instruments inspired by liberal environmental governance. This overlap generates hybridization, tensions, and conflicts of representation. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Dionewar, the paper examines how these frictions manifest in community-based management of socio-ecological systems under climate stress. It argues that effective adaptation cannot be achieved without recognizing the validity of local epistemes and without addressing the structural hierarchies that render them invisible. In the Anthropocene era—marked by both planetary uncertainty and the persistence of neoliberal ideology—the Niominka experience illuminates the need to rethink adaptation as a plural, situated, and contested process. Three unresolved issues emerge: the marginalization of endogenous knowledge, its fragile transmission across generations, and the geopolitics embedded in global climate action. Together, they call for a deeper reconsideration of adaptation beyond technocratic approaches and toward relational, culturally grounded pathways.