Think about the following question: Who are climate adaptation plans built around? Intuitively, one would answer that they are built around the people who actually live inside them, the affected communities. In reality, that is far from the truth; national adaptation plans are drafted by ministries and consultants, while financing strategies are designed and negotiated by development banks and other technical partners.
The people all of this impacts — the farmers, fishers, herders and others like them who’ve lived with the problem and can offer invaluable expertise from a lens the experts may not possess — show up on these plans as an afterthought, as “beneficiaries,” when they could instead be treated as sources of the plans’ actual content.
What makes things worse is that this often goes unnoticed, and even when it is, it is treated as a resourcing problem. The rebuttals revolve around how governments are strapped for cash, how public consultations can be expensive and time-consuming, and that the technical expertise also has to come from somewhere.
In response to this, a growing body of philosophical and policy work has come to argue that what is really happening is far more nuanced than just logistics. It’s not just about a shortage of money or time, but rather a systematic ignorance of certain people’s capacity to know things. In philosophy, this is called “epistemic injustice,” and as uncomfortable as it is as a concept, it is very useful in understanding why, despite adaptation plans being invested in and given importance to, the same kind of blind spots keep reappearing.
What “epistemic injustice” actually means
To understand the problem, one must first understand the term itself, coined by philosopher Miranda Fricker. It is used to describe a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower, meaning that their opinion is undervalued not because their conclusions have been tested and found lacking, but just because of who they are.
Fricker further splits this concept into two similar forms. The first is testimonial injustice, which happens when prejudices lead to a listener discounting what someone says. For example, in the case of official planning, a fisherman’s account of changing tides may not be treated the same as a hydrologist’s model, regardless of how well each has performed over time.
On the other hand, hermeneutical injustice goes far deeper: it occurs when the concepts used to describe a problem were developed without a relevant group’s experience in mind, meaning that this group cannot even express their knowledge in ways that relevant stakeholders have the capacity to understand.
When it comes to climate adaptation, both forms of epistemic injustice fit well. In Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, researchers argue that adaptation policy is often epistemically unjust towards Indigenous Peoples because their knowledge systems are treated as inferior or anecdotal, rather than serving as evidence in their own right. This is a textbook case of testimonial injustice.
This point is taken further when plans are built around technical frameworks — such as cost-benefit models and risk indices — that were not designed to consider knowledge that hasn’t already been quantified, even though the expertise that these communities offer is more qualitative in nature.
Another paper applying the concept to sustainable development makes a similar point: unfair treatment in “knowledge-related and communicative practices” is not just a feature of developmental failures, but is a way they are reproduced in the first place. This argument isn’t limited to Indigenous communities — recent studies have also expanded it to include disabled people, who are frequently written into adaptation plans as a vulnerable category that needs to be protected, rather than being consulted as holders of relevant expertise about their own risks and needs.
Why this is a fairness question, not just an efficiency one
It would be easy to justify this argument purely on effectiveness grounds: plans built without local input will naturally misjudge what people actually need and will consequently waste money on infrastructure that nobody asked for, which in turn will be ignored when those developing it leave. All of this is true, but treating the exclusion of local knowledge as a problem in its own right, regardless of the outcomes it produces, matters for another very important reason.
Injustice doesn’t disappear even when top-down plans happen to work out. Why? Because communities whose experiences were never heard and whose views of the risks were never consulted have still been wronged in their capacity as knowers, no matter the outcome. Epistemic injustice is a claim about who counts as a legitimate form of knowledge, and it ultimately becomes a question of respect and dignity, rather than simply whether a policy output was good or bad.
This point is also important because it affects how adaptation should be planned. A perspective that prioritises efficiency treats local consultation as a data source that can be used for better outputs, as an instrument of sorts. Alternatively, a perspective that values justice instead treats communities as knowers whose exclusion is itself harmful, and it defines the fix differently: not better extraction of local information into existing plans, but a real shift in who holds decision-making power over those plans to begin with.
Related Articles
Here is a list of articles selected by our Editorial Board that have gained significant interest from the public:
- Indigenous Peoples: Defending an Environment for All
- The Role of Behavioural Science in Climate Change Adaptation
- Are We There Yet? A Review of ‘Nature’s Echo’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’
- How Indigenous-Led Conservation Can Save The Planet
- Preparing Financing Strategies for Climate Adaptation: Emerging Good Practices
What a fairer process looks like
The transition to a fairer way of navigating this process is not a foreign concept, and already has a name in the field of adaptation: “locally-led adaptation.” The World Resources Institute’s Principles for Locally Led Adaptation, which have been endorsed by more than 100 governments and organizations, put it this way: local institutions and communities should not just be merely consulted on plans made by someone else, but rather should have their own access to finance and real decision-making process on how adaptation plans are defined, prioritized, designed and tested.
The most important takeaway is one of the eight principles, which calls for building “a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty” by combining local, traditional, indigenous, generational and scientific knowledge, instead of treating the latter as the only legitimate input.
The factor that heavily influences whether this can actualise or stay rhetorical is money. Research from the International Institute for Sustainable Development on financing strategies for adaptation found that few countries’ plans even analyze which projects are best suited to which types of finance, let alone who gets to direct that finance.
This is the kind of situation that tends to reproduce exactly the top-down pattern epistemic injustice describes, since resource-mobilization decisions stay with ministries and technical partners rather than moving toward the communities the WRI principles call for. Locally led adaptation — predictable, easily accessible funding that flows to local institutions — isn’t just fairer distribution; it’s what makes it possible for local knowledge to actually influence decisions, rather than being solicited and then set aside.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that scientific modelling and technical expertise should be ignored. The point isn’t that local knowledge is always right and expert knowledge is unrepresentative. The real point is that treating one as evidence, and the other as an afterthought, is a bias that needs to be kept in check. Some promising work that was recently done, including efforts to combine locally led approaches with AI-driven monitoring tools, has been very up-front about this. The technology is judged against benchmarks created in partnership with the communities using it, rather than imposed as an external layer on top of what people already know.
The takeaway
Adaptation plans that leave out the people who are familiar with and subject to the risks and consequences are not only missing useful information. What they are doing is far more serious, and that is to make a judgement on whose testimony counts as knowledge and whose doesn’t. Seeing that judgement for what it is makes it very hard to get behind. Consequently, it means rethinking who gets to hold the pen that signs off on the decisions, who decides what counts as evidence, who controls the financing and who gets to decide when a plan is actually making progress.
Until this changes, adaptation plans will continue being developed through the lens of the experts alone, who remain oblivious to the voices of the people living with those problems
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com
