ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how infrastructural responsibility is negotiated and enacted in extractive communities facing both climatic uncertainty, environmental degradation, and institutional incapacity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Adukrom, a Ghanaian gold mining settlement, it introduces the concept of Strategic Social Responsibility (SSR) to describe how non-state actors, such as artisanal miners, local elites, and political aspirants, mobilise resources to install and maintain water infrastructure. While these actors are not formal climate agents, their interventions help communities cope with water scarcity intensified by climate variability, extractive degradation, and failed public service delivery. These infrastructures, though improvised and politically motivated, effectively function as vernacular adaptation infrastructures, that is, practical responses that shield communities from environmental precarity in the absence of state or corporate provision. Rather than interpreting these actions as straightforward Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) substitutes or electoral patronage, the chapter argues that SSR reflects a deeper politics of adaptation: One grounded in informal authority, moral claims, and the performance of care. In doing so, SSR reconfigures how responsibility for climate adaptation is distributed, enacted, and made visible in extractive zones. This challenges mainstream adaptation discourse, which often centres on institutional actors and overlooks the role of “twilight” governance arrangements. By highlighting how adaptation infrastructures emerge from below, amid crisis, competition, and contested legitimacy, the chapter offers a grounded, plural understanding of climate futures in contexts where extractive economies, social inequality, and environmental stress converge.
