From Imagination to Practical Understandings: meaning making in climate change adaptation

The climate crisis calls for transformative responses, including transforming the governance and practices of adaptation and the purposes of adaptation actions. This thesis contributes to understanding the inertia that marks adaptation and provides empirically grounded reflections on how to move towards transformative adaptation. Combining Critical Future Studies, using imaginaries, with Social Practice Theory, this study explores meaning-making processes shaping adaptation governance, its purpose, boundaries, and how it is performed. This is done through an overview of globally circulating and competing climate adaptation imaginaries, and a layered case study of regional imaginaries and situated practices of adaptation governance in the Swedish public sector. The study finds that the dominant imaginaries and practices in the Swedish public sector assume that the future is predictable and controllable. These assumptions are intertwined with (often) unspoken ideals of economic growth, technological innovations and expert-led planning. This promotes proactive, but incremental adaptation strategies, where transboundary risks are ignored while transboundary benefits are assumed to remain. Consequentially, long-term perspectives, uncertainty, and plausible high-risk scenarios, are downplayed. Transforming society through transformative adaptation is a slow process, fraught with overcoming unequal power dynamics. From a practice perspective, it will begin through making space for joint critical reflection on the assumptions and ends that guide routine responses of ‘doing’ adaptation. This must be combined with explicitly debating and imagining desirable futures that accommodate the uncertainty generated by recognizing transboundary risks and long-term perspectives.