The paper argues that achieving transformative adaptation requires centering justice by addressing power imbalances, valuing diverse knowledges, fostering grassroots agency, and embracing uncertainty and learning.

Multiple Authors

August 11, 2025
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Green fields, Malawi — Agricultural fields Malawi. Credit: Maria Zardoya on Unsplash

This article uses extracts and summaries of the original text, which can be downloaded from the right-hand column. Please access the original text for more detail, case examples, for full references, or to quote text.

Introduction

In response to growing concerns about ‘maladaptive’ outcomes in climate change adaptation projects, a new wave of approaches is focusing on transforming the social, economic, and political systems that create vulnerability, making this transformation a central part of sustainability. This perspective is captured in the idea of ‘transformative adaptation,’ which calls for deep changes in social, institutional, technological, and cultural systems to build the capacity of affected communities to address climate challenges. By raising critical questions about whose values, knowledge, and agency are prioritized in mainstream adaptation planning, the transformative adaptation agenda has challenged both prevailing practices and the power structures behind them. However, putting transformative adaptation into practice also raises difficult questions about how its core values – justice, empowerment, and sustainability – can be realized. This makes it essential to draw on examples of reflexive practice to guide transformative adaptation at both project and program levels.

This paper argues that transformative adaptation requires a strongly reflexive approach, where the key assumptions, beliefs, and decisions within adaptation projects are continuously examined. The authors see adaptation as an active learning process that empowers grassroots actors throughout project design, implementation, and evaluation, supporting the central goal of placing justice at the heart of transformative adaptation.

Approach

Adaptation interventions include actions and decision-making processes from projects, policies and strategies which can be implemented at multiple levels, including community, ecosystem, and different levels of political administration, through a diversity of actors, from socially diversified populations to local leaders, businesses, civil society organisations, government and administration.

To attain just outcomes requires building justice into the process of adaptation itself by opening up space for contesting the uneven power relations and the worldviews and practices that underpin them. In short, addressing justice and equity in process requires questioning dominant societal narratives and ‘business-as-usual’ approaches in order to position people in vulnerable situations at the centre of adaptation efforts.

Building on this sentiment, the paper outlines four key operational principles towards better embedding justice into the processes of adaptation planning and practice (Fig. 1) and the authors substantiate these principles through a breadth of case study references (see document on right hand side for cases and references). After introducing each of these four principles, the paper provide a concise table (Table 1 below) that identifies common challenges associated with current practices and some examples of specific actions that can help to overcome these challenges.

Fig. 1. Elements of a reflexive approach to adaptation.

Introducing four reflexive approaches to adaptation

1. Contest Power Relations

Power relations are deeply embedded within climate adaptation processes, shaping who defines priorities, allocates resources, and determines the criteria for success. Despite their pervasive influence, these dynamics are frequently left unexamined, resulting in unintended consequences such as elite capture and the reinforcement of existing social and economic inequalities.

Adaptation initiatives often depend on collaboration with local elites—individuals who possess pre-existing relationships with project implementers and share similar epistemic frameworks. While such partnerships may facilitate rapid implementation and compliance with externally imposed timelines, they risk marginalising less powerful actors and concentrating benefits among privileged groups.

To address these imbalances, adaptation planning must adopt a reflexive and inclusive approach that explicitly acknowledges and engages with power asymmetries. This entails fostering multi-stakeholder dialogue, promoting collaborative learning, ensuring transparency in decision-making, and implementing structured facilitation methods to mitigate disparities in influence among participants.

Empirical evidence from initiatives such as the Promoting Sustainable Partnerships for Empowered Resilience (PROSPER) project in Malawi illustrates the potential of inclusive methodologies to counter elite capture. Through community wealth ranking and transparent participant selection processes, the project was able to enhance representational equity and improve distributive outcomes, albeit at a higher resource cost.

Ultimately, while power cannot be removed from adaptation processes, it can be recognised, interrogated, and rebalanced. Reflexivity—understood as a critical awareness of how power shapes both the goals and mechanisms of adaptation—is essential. Moreover, while decentralisation may offer opportunities for more democratic engagement, it is insufficient on its own to address entrenched inequalities. Intentional strategies must be employed to ensure that adaptation efforts are genuinely inclusive, equitable, and responsive to the needs of all stakeholders.

2. Embracing Knowledge Pluralism in Adaptation Practice

A critical dimension of equitable and effective climate adaptation involves the recognition and integration of diverse knowledge systems, particularly those that extend beyond dominant Western scientific paradigms. Despite increasing rhetorical support for the inclusion of local and Indigenous knowledge, its practical incorporation into adaptation planning remains limited and often superficial. For instance, only a small proportion of African governments have meaningfully integrated such knowledge into water resource adaptation strategies.

In many cases, local knowledge is treated as a supplementary input rather than as an equal epistemological framework. This marginalisation reflects broader power asymmetries in knowledge production and decision-making. To address this, adaptation processes must adopt a reflexive and co-productive approach, wherein diverse actors collaboratively engage in iterative processes of problem framing, knowledge sharing, and action planning.

Knowledge co-production is not merely about inclusion but about transforming the conditions under which knowledge is generated and valued. It requires deliberate efforts to equalise relationships among participants, foster mutual respect, and create spaces for epistemic plurality. This includes validating oral histories, spiritual practices, and lived experiences as legitimate forms of knowledge that can inform adaptation strategies.

Importantly, co-production should not aim to synthesise all knowledge into a singular narrative. Instead, it must preserve the distinctiveness of different epistemologies, recognising that tensions between ways of “knowing nature” and “knowing society” are inherent and politically significant. As such, co-production is a political act that necessitates critical reflection on participation, representation, and the structural conditions that shape knowledge hierarchies.

Ultimately, embracing knowledge pluralism entails a commitment to enhancing grassroots agency, addressing gendered and structural inequities, and ensuring that co-produced knowledge informs real-world decisions. This approach not only enriches the epistemic foundations of adaptation but also strengthens its legitimacy, inclusivity, and transformative potential.

3. Fostering Bottom-Up Coalitions for Transformative Adaptation

Transformative climate adaptation requires more than technical interventions—it demands the active cultivation of grassroots coalitions that can sustain locally grounded knowledge and priorities. Rather than focusing solely on predefined outcomes, adaptation efforts must invest in building social networks and alliances among those most affected by climate change, thereby shifting the political terrain that constrains transformative change.

Empirical examples from India and Mexico demonstrate the value of coalition-building across researchers, NGOs, activists, and community groups. These alliances help legitimise subaltern knowledge, mobilise collective agency, and challenge dominant institutions that typically monopolise policy influence. Successful coalitions are built on trust, mutual recognition, and appreciation of diverse approaches, enabling the co-creation of knowledge and action across scales.

This emphasis on bottom-up mobilisation distinguishes locally led adaptation from earlier community-based models, offering a more politically grounded and inclusive pathway for change. By leveraging existing social movements and institutional affiliations, such coalitions can create transformative spaces for environmental governance that are both decolonial and participatory.

4. Preempting Tradeoffs and Unintended Outcomes in Adaptation

Adaptation interventions often produce uneven benefits and risks, particularly along gendered and socio-economic lines. Empowering some groups may inadvertently disempower others, yet such tradeoffs are frequently obscured in project planning to maintain donor and institutional support. The tendency to frame adaptation as delivering universally positive outcomes—such as the “triple wins” of climate-smart agriculture—limits critical engagement with complex, long-term impacts and equity concerns.

To address this, adaptation must embrace reflexivity: acknowledging the potential for unintended consequences and recognising that these outcomes are experienced differently across social groups. This requires flexible planning, continuous learning, and inclusive monitoring and evaluation systems that reflect diverse perspectives on success, particularly those of grassroots actors.

Creating pluralistic learning spaces—where assumptions, metrics, and silenced outcomes can be openly interrogated—is essential. These spaces should foster deliberation, support adaptive responses, and foreground gendered dynamics and structural inequalities. Only through such reflexive engagement can adaptation initiatives remain responsive, equitable, and transformative.

Conclusion

Transformative adaptation needs change not just among those who act on the ground but also among those who fund and plan interventions. Traditional methods of doing adaptation, like strict planning and timelines, go against the principles of transformation. This review outlines four important features of a reflexive approach to transformative adaptation focused on justice: (1) confronting power relations, (2) embracing knowledge diversity, (3) building bottom-up coalitions, and (4) acknowledging trade-offs and unexpected results. Organizations are urged to allow for learning and open discussions to improve adaptation practices, favoring longer-term funding for better local engagement and collaboration. While detailed actions for these principles are not covered here, examples are provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Entry points for pluralistic learning spaces that help centre justice in adaptation.

Principle	Common and persistent challenges	Actions addressing challenges exemplified
Contest power relations	Elite capture at community level Dominant focus on the physical resilience of infrastructure or economic losses as a main goal of interventions Privileging the high-value physical assets of richer groups rather than the smaller or intangible losses of poorer groups. Lack of recognition of the historical and current socio-political differences and injustices	Community: promote engaged representatives of diversity of stakeholders. Local administration/ecosystems: Support continued engagement through researcher-practitioners. Project design: focus on the resilience of rights, such as how project investments can support rights claims and secure access to resources, social and physical infrastructure in the face of climate events and climate change (e.g. rights and entitlements in urban resilience planning. National planning: Inclusion of mechanisms to examine losses and risks across social groups and identify which outcomes are to be avoided for vulnerable groups.
Embrace knowledge pluralism	Attitudes and understandings that situate groups as vulnerable and incapable recipients of adaptation performed by external experts, imposing externally defined problem understandings and solutions. Viewing ‘local communities’ as socially homogeneous with uniform knowledge and needs. Designating local/indigenous knowledge as ‘supplementary’ information that merely helps refine or legitimise scientific approaches. Local consultation as a tick-box exercise rather than authentic engagement in framing problem understandings	Community: Inclusive and representative participatory approaches can shift narratives and power dynamics. Local administrative: Participatory processes of knowledge co-creation at city scale challenge predominant knowledge hierarchies. Project design: take often-invisible issues (like disability, discrimination, violence) as an explicit entry point, for example assigning ‘invisible groups’ active expert roles in leading dialogues and sourcing the locally embedded sources of resilience and adaptation knowledges of these groups. National planning: Ensure inclusion of indigenous/local knowledge in adaptation planning.
Foster bottom-up coalitions	Lack of involvement of local communities leading to their shouldering the burden of reviving adaptation projects after their official end (as exemplified in Ecuador). Localising as pushing responsibility for risk management to vulnerable individuals and groups.	Community/across scales: Project and planning emphasis on inclusion as partnership and relationship building (beyond consultation). Local administration/ecosystem: Providing safe spaces for engagement of actors activated new agency in the Xochimilco urban wetland. National planning: building multisector transformative spaces in the seed sector in Argentina; coalitions are required between multiple actors including from grassroots.
Pre-empt trade-offs and unexpected outcomes	Marginal groups not afforded space in knowledge and decision-making processes, leading to unanticipated outcomes and maladaptationNational discourses crowding out needs of vulnerable groups at more local scale (e.g. with climate smart agriculture discourses) Short project cycles and reporting structures with predefined activities and outputs, that focus on efficiency of delivery rather than reflexive learning to assess and engage trade-offs and unexpected outcomes. Rigid monitoring and evaluation systems (often quantitative only indicators) do not provide scope for learning, or encourage flexibility as necessary	Local to national adaptation interventions: Commitment to monitoring, evaluation and learning, where learning takes place within project lifespans so there is capacity to apply adaptive management. Increased focus on qualitative monitoring and evaluation. Participation of stakeholders and target populations in framing monitoring, evaluation and learning procedures.Flexible and iterative implementation approaches. International and national: Longer-term funding to allow time for outcomes and impacts to be realistically reached and trust and relationships to be built.

Central to this approach is the foregrounding of learning processes targeted at shifting existing knowledge and power relations. These are critical to avoid maladaptive outcomes that exacerbate the vulnerability and exclusion of already marginalised groups and thereby undermine sustainable outcomes.

A priority is to create reflexive learning spaces within organisations that foster deeper reflection about the assumptions driving how we design, govern and implement adaptation activities. This would usefully involve spaces for different actors to interact across scales and work areas, engaging deliberative meeting practices to focus on what we do not know, what and who is unseen, as well as what processes and practices hold systems in place that hamper effectively addressing vulnerability.

Opening up democratic space in decision-making processes for deliberation and representation of those in vulnerable situations is a prerequisite to socially just adaptation actions but in and of itself is not sufficient.

Drawing on lessons from varied contexts, this paper has identified, key entry points for creating more pluralistic learning spaces that can more fundamentally help shift power relations within adaptation interventions and decision-making processes.

Embracing a reflexive approach in this manner can help to reveal and redress the practices, attitudes and understandings through which some people and experiences of vulnerability garner attention while others are rendered silent.

Citation

Taylor, M., Eriksen, S., Vincent, K., Scoville-Simonds, M., Brooks, N., Schipper, E.L.F. (2025) Integrating power, justice and reflexivity into transformative climate change adaptation, Global Environmental Change, 91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2025.102981