Resisting Post-Political Adaptation to Climate Change: How a Small Community Stood Up to Big Development

Abstract

Recent critical scholarship has brought attention to local resistance in the spaces of adaptation, with reported instances of local communities rejecting planned adaptation interventions around the world. As adaptation funding is only expected to grow, so should our understanding of this resistance. In this article, I investigate one such dispute where residents of a small village in São Tomé and Príncipe refused to participate in an adaptation project implemented by the national government and the United Nations Development Programme. I ground my analysis in the literature on post-politics and discuss the community's resistance as a Rancièrian “political interruption” of the post-political adaptation configuration in the country. I also investigate the factors that arguably led to local resistance, including the residents’ disillusion with what I term Big Development, and their political subjectivation through a local grassroots initiative. The paper concludes with reflections on countering the post-politics of adaptation as a prerequisite for more democratic and equitable local climate governance.