Description
Efforts to improve adaptive capacity and reduce the vulnerability of local communities in the global south have involved many multilevel stakeholders, such as government agencies, donor agencies, NGOs, academia, and corporations. These actors usually bring new ways to adapt and shape the conduct of local communities in dealing with climate change through many adaptation interventions. Some interventions work well to improve the adaptive capacity of local communities, but others only redistribute gains and losses among local communities. Even the adaptation intervention might cause maladaptation, such as widening economic inequality among local communities. The question remains to what extent adaptation projects redistribute gains and losses in the global south. The analysis of this chapter draws from the political economy of CCA by Sovacool, Linnér, and Goodsite (2015). Their approach offers a systematic framework to analyse four political economy processes in four dimensions of development. Each process can be utilised to analyse the CCA challenges in each development dimension, including economic, political, ecological, and social. There are some limitations of Sovacool, Linnér, and Goodsite’s (2015) typology in analysing the CCA phenomenon in developing countries where the local communities’ cultural heritage practices remain strong in everyday life. This paper includes a cultural dimension in the analysis as a contribution. Climate Change Adaptation programs, by utilising modern techniques, sometimes force local communities to learn new techniques because they consider this as a better solution. This situation makes local communities to let go their cultural heritage practices and causes another maladaptation, cultural erosion. This paper selects four adaptation villages that get adaptation projects in Indonesia as case studies to expose how the political-economic processes in rendering adaptation projects increase the vulnerability of local communities and cause maladaptation, such as cultural erosion, widening inequality gap, and environmental degradation.
