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Health. Disability. Vulnerability. These words are often used when discussing the risks of climate disruption. These discussions warn of the potential for climate impacts to "undermine 50 years of gains in public health" (as stated by the Lancet Countdown on Climate Change). Increasingly, such discussions also acknowledge climate injustice, examining who will benefit or lose out from climate change, how and why. The embodied vulnerability of disabled people is often assumed within such discussions, with less consideration of the social, economic or political conditions that create this vulnerability. By bringing disability justice and disability studies into correspondence with care, environmental and climate justice scholarship, this reflective paper challenges the master narratives that blur differentiated experiences of disability and climate impacts into a single story of inevitable vulnerability. Recognising disabled people as knowers, makers and agents of change, it calls for transformative climate action, underpinned by values of solidarity, mutuality and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasingly fragmented rangelands, restricted mobility and climatic stress, diversification has accelerated among East African pastoralists. Diversification is also promoted as a climate change adaptation strategy to reduce climatic exposure. Through a study of a Maasai communal land in southern Kenya, we analyze how pastoralists navigate changing access to key productive resources that are linked to diversification processes, social differentiation, and the reshaping of livelihood practices. By integrating an intersectional approach in access theory, we unpack a deeper level of context specific patterns of inclusion and exclusion embedded within evolving production relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alarming rates of environmental change have catalyzed scholars to call for fundamental transformations in social‐political and economic relations. Yet cautionary tales about how power and politics are constitutive of these efforts fill the literature. We show how a relational framing of adaptation and transformation demands a political, cross‐scalar, and socionatural analysis to probe the affects and effects of climate change and better grasp how transformative change unfolds. We bring affect theory into conversation with the literature on adaptation politics, socio‐environmental transformations, subjectivity, and our empirical work to frame our analysis around three under investigated aspects of transformation: (i) the uncertain and unpredictable relations that constitute socionatures; (ii) other ways of knowing; and (iii) the affective and emotional relations that form a basis for action. Affective adaptation represents a different ontological take on transformation by reframing the socionatural, normative and ethical aspects as relational, uncertain, and performative. This directs analytical attention to processes rather than outcomes. The emphasis on the encounter between bodies in affect theory points to the need for experiential and embodied ways of knowing climate to effect transformative change. Effective transformation requires recognizing uncertainty and unpredictability as part of transformative processes. This is not because all outcomes are acceptable, but rather because uncertainty and unpredictability are elements which help generate affects (action) and emotional commitment to shared human and more than human relations in action, projects, and policies. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses governance of water infrastructure in two settlements of Baltistan as an entry point to examine the co-production of power and vulnerability. Access to water and irrigated land is a critical factor in determining how the effects of disasters, such as flooding, are socially distributed within a community. At the same time, the governance of water is intimately linked to the longer-term politics of disaster vulnerability. We examine three different forms of disputes over water infrastructure where struggles over authority and social ordering materialise: (i) between and within settlements over access to a water resource; (ii) within settlements over post-disaster water infrastructure development and (iii) between a settlement and the district government over land, water rights and flood protection. The findings illustrate that the governance of water infrastructure involves continuous negotiations, contestations and disputes over access rights. Access to water resources as an expression of rights plays a key role in the recognition of authority relations. In particular, influential individuals seek to legitimise their leadership role in a settlement by representing the rights and interests of groups in the negotiation of these disputes. However, environmental variability and change, including disasters and post-disaster development interventions, alter perceptions of what constitute legitimate rights, and provide spaces for popular contestation of authority relations through silent non-compliance with decisions. The close interlinkages between material and non-material effects of a disaster are a key feature of the co-production of power and vulnerability. By adding authority relations to studies of village-level practices around disasters, we enrich our understanding of the co-production of power and vulnerability and how these dynamics unfold over time. It is only by investigating this co-production that a deeper understanding can be developed of the mechanisms through which vulnerability is either exacerbated or reduced for particular groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]