Description
Climate change adaptation is inevitable in order to counter major effects of climate change. Nevertheless, current practices are embedded in a discourse favouring technocratic explanations and responses, concealing that climate change and vulnerability to it are highly political and stem from a politico-economic system that is based on exploitation and profit, condoning amongst others environmental destruction, discrimination and marginalization.
In response, critical adaptation research has established itself as a field that scrutinizes current practices in adaptation policy and practice. It has done extensive work revealing how current adaptation research and practices depoliticise climate change and vulnerability (Remling 2018; Nightingale et al. 2020), obfuscate how risks are created and why people are vulnerable (O'Brien et al. 2007; Eriksen et al. 2015), mask dynamics to people’s vulnerabilities (Tschakert et al. 2013), lack transformative elements that addresses structural change (Morchain 2018), and re-produce vulnerability as natural and inherent to people affected by climate change (Ribot 2011).
The question why leading institutions can’t (or don’t want to) escape the trap of essentializing and naturalizing vulnerability remains vague. Although participatory approaches and the inclusion of ‘local’ and ‘indigenous knowledges’ have recently gained popularity to tackle the root causes of vulnerability (IPCC 2014), the paper argues that their integration into the discourse and adaptation practice serves as a complement to physical understandings rather than in their own right to live, reproducing epistemic injustice that undermines historic struggles, future possibilities for self-de- termination and alternative ways of living despite the capitalist mode of exploitation.
This paper aims at contributing to this gap through the reintroduction of feminist standpoint theory and an appeal to strong objectivity, or strong situatedness in adaptation research. Revisiting Haraway’s metaphor of the god trick, this paper explores how the claim to objectivity in Western thought has constricted adaptation research and practice to consider and effectively implement alternative approaches to vulnerability reduction apart from techno-scientific and economic stances. The paper wants to find out whether the premise of the ability to adapt, that is, non-vulnerability, is used to instrumentalize the vulnerable Other to reproduce the normative power of the Global North and southern elites. It aims at revealing how vulnerability reduction through adaptation has in itself become a political project that “guarantees and refreshes the power of the knower” (Haraway 1988, p. 592).
To achieve this, the paper delivers a historical outline of how climate ideas and knowledge have emerged, and the over-privilege of physical explanations have been consolidated that led to today’s monolithic understanding of vulnerability that can be healed through technical interventions. The paper then analyses how the objectivity claim – the gaze from nowhere – has influenced the institutionalized understanding of what and who is vulnerable in IPCC working papers. It argues that “the dreams of the perfectly known” (Haraway 1988, p. 589) of Western thought have led adaptation emerge as an unpersonal, innocent endeavour whose application appears to be unquestionable.
The paper then takes a turn and discusses how strong objectivity may provide a much-needed shift in how adaptation and vulnerability can be conceptualized. It concludes that the de-obfuscation of the gaze from nowhere and making actively visible standpoints on envisioned futures creates strong environments for contestation, critique, affinity, and also responsibility.
