ABSTRACT
Climate change adaptation is an opportunity for social reform, for the questioning of values that drive inequalities in development and our unsustainable relationship with the environment. But this outcome is by no means certain and growing evidence suggests that too often adaptation is imagined as a non-political, technological domain and enacted in a defensive rather than a progressive spirit. Adaptation has been framed in terms of identifying what is to be preserved and what is expendable, rather than what can be reformed or gained. Dominant development discourses put the economy as first to be preserved, above cultural flourishing or ecological health. There is a danger that adaptation policy and practice will be reduced to seeking the preservation of an economic core, rather than allowing it to foster the flourishing of cultural and social as well as economic development, or of improved governance that seeks to incorporate the interests of future generations, non-human entities and the marginalised.
