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Climate change adaptation is a power-laden process that requires engagement and negotiation between people with diverse needs, interests, and levels of authority. Entrenched hierarchies in adaptation decision making influence what is considered legitimate policy and action, whose values are prioritized, and the interests of which actors are excluded. Through content and discourse analysis of interviews and focus group discussions with policymakers and decision makers across multiple spatial and jurisdictional levels, we illustrate how specific actors involved in adaptation efforts comprehend and engage with tensions, institutional politics, and community-level power dynamics, focusing on the experiences of rural farmers who are often sidelined in adaptation processes. We advance critical scholarship on the politics of adaptation and the politics of scale to demonstrate how power relations move within and across levels of decision making, by scrutinizing the discursive and material construction of scales and subjects. We argue that nuanced investigations of power and its (re)production across levels and scales are crucial to expose the underrepresentation of marginalized citizens in adaptation debates and to envision subversive political interventions toward climate justice. Key Words: agriculture, climate change adaptation, climate justice, decision making, Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate emergency demands that principles and practices of justice and injustice, harm, loss, suffering, and hope are revisited, to encompass both the human and the natural world and the many interconnections between them. Following work on the Unknown Other in climate justice discourse, I examine a relational space of proximity, empathy, and responsibility across human and non-human Others to advance current understandings of multispecies justice. Via four types of encounters – the visual, the embodied, the ethical, and the political – it is possible to engage in empathetic experiences with and enact responsibility toward infinite other beings and confront layers of shared vulnerabilities and histories of silencing and erasures. These encounters across space and time make tangible what a nature of human and more-than-human togetherness and solidarity may look like and what ethics and politics would be required to overcome untenable human exceptionalism in today's crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities in the Global South are quintessential sites for climate adaptation; many are rapidly expanding, struggle with increasing inequalities and experience unprecedented harm from climatic extremes. Despite scholarly recognition that adaptation pathways should reduce multidimensional vulnerabilities and inequalities, current adaptation efforts largely preserve the status quo. Many benefit powerful actors while further entrenching the poor and disadvantaged in cycles of dispossession. We bring together scholarship on adaptation pathways, politics and practice to deconstruct adaptation trajectories. We propose three conceptual steps – acknowledging injustices, embracing deliberation and nurturing responsibility for human and more-than-human others – to chart inclusive pathways towards just climate futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, the climate emergency entered mainstream debates. The normative frame of climate justice as conceived in academia, policy arenas, and grassroots action, although imperative and growing in popularity across climate movements, is no longer adequate to address this emergency. This is for two reasons: first, as a framing for the problem, current notions of climate justice are insufficient to overcome the persistent silencing of voices belonging to multiple "others"; and second, they do not question, and thus implicitly condone, human exceptionalism and the violence it enacts, historically and in this era of the Anthropocene. Therefore, we advocate for the concept of multispecies justice to enrich climate justice in order to more effectively confront the climate crisis. The advantage of reconceptualizing climate justice in this way is that it becomes more inclusive; it acknowledges the differential histories and practices of social, environmental, and ecological harm, while opening just pathways into uncertain futures. A multispecies justice lens expands climate justice by decentering the human and by recognizing the everyday interactions that bind individuals and societies to networks of close and distant others, including other people and more‐than‐human beings. Such a relational lens provides a vital scientific, practical, material, and ethical road map for navigating the complex responsibilities and politics in the climate crisis. Most importantly, it delineates what genuine flourishing could mean, what systemic transformations may involve (and with whom), how to live with inevitable and possibly intolerable losses, and how to prefigure and enact alternative and just futures. This article is categorized under:Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• State-led adaptation to floods has unjust outcomes for floodplain residents. • Unjust outcomes include poverty traps and heightened environmental risk. • Floodplain dwellers contest, negotiate, and resist state-led adaptation efforts. • Everyday resistance provides political openings for more just adaptation futures. As flood events become more intense and frequent, cities throughout the world increasingly devise projects for flood management and control, including hard and soft infrastructural solutions. Among these, an emblematic example is the project Parque Várzeas do Tietê (PVT) – or Tietê Lowlands Park – a 75 km-long floodplain restoration scheme proposed by the government of São Paulo, Brazil, to allegedly solve the city's flooding problem. The project's execution, however, is contingent on the removal of approximately 7500 low-income families, raising questions on the intertwined relationship between adaptation to flooding and the exclusion of informal urban settlements. Drawing on urban and feminist political ecology, we use the PVT as a case study to examine the politics and uneven outcomes of adaptation in São Paulo's eastern periphery. We combine archival and ethnographic work to expose the persistent politics of invisibility that sustain the project's exclusionary contours. In the process, we also demonstrate the various ways floodplain residents reshape their invisibility to contest, negotiate, and resist the PVT in the spaces of their everyday lives. As a result, the analysis identifies the project's perverse effects but also opportunities for productive engagements between the government and local communities towards more just, inclusive, and equitable adaptation futures in São Paulo, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]