This course is about the politics of survival. In a world where global warming has already risen beyond 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, communities in every corner of the world are exposed to increasingly frequent and severe episodes of extreme weather, including hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and flooding. How are societies adapting to this? And how are the dynamics of climate change adaptation shaping politics? This course offers an introduction to the politics of climate change adaptation. We conceptualise adaptation as a fundamentally political issue, both facilitated by policy and politics and in itself acting as a force for shaping political outcomes.

Where existing literature on the politics of climate change has overwhelmingly focussed on climate change mitigation in the Global North, this course draws attention to the growing body of work on the politics of climate change adaptation and takes a global perspective. It considers how adaptation challenges vary between countries of the Global North and Global South and encourages critical engagement with the research designs and methods being used to study the politics of climate change adaptation.