The Political Economy of Climate Change Adaptation

Adaptation policies and measures are essential components of any global attempt to cope with the pending impacts of climate change. Drawing on concepts in political economy, political ecology, justice theory, and critical development studies, this book offers the first comprehensive, systematic exploration of the ways in which adaptation projects can produce unintended, undesirable results. The authors present a political economy framework revolving around four key processes: enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment. They document the presence of these four inequitable attributes in adaptation projects across four case studies: the displacement of char communities in Bangladesh; the Dutch Delta Works in the Netherlands; Hurricane Katrina reconstruction efforts in the United States; and the politics of technology transfer and knowledge inequality within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Benjamin K. Sovacool is Director of the Center for Energy Technologies and Professor of Business and Social Sciences in the Department of Business and Technology at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed academic articles, book chapters, and reports as well as the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 18 books, including Energy Poverty (with A. Halff and J. Rozhon, 2015), Global Energy Justice (with M. H. Dworkin, 2014), and Energy & Ethics: Justice and the Global Energy Challenge (2013).

Bjorn-Ola Linner is Professor in Water and Environmental Studies at the Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research at Linkoping University, Sweden. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers, and many popular science publications and books, including The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Postwar Population-Resource Crises (2004). He has been actively involved in international climate negotiations for several years.