Publication

Adaptation to climate change is increasingly advocated as we approach a 1.5 degrees C future. Policy-makers emphasise that the required transformation begins with local action. Yet, there is a gap in understanding why local action can remain largely locked-in to maladaptive cycles, with variable on-ground evidence of transformative change. Using 'the politics of scale,' we interrogated 'the local' using ethnographic interviews. We found that although local actors are engaged in various ways, 'doing' environmental work at a very local scale, their practices are constrained, reinforced by cultural, political, and economic arguments. We conceptualise 'hyper-localism' and 'temporal passivity' as emergent conditions that mask connectivity to wider social and ecological networks leading to transformative possibilities. We argue that global climate change discourses reinforce these internal conditions by failing to acknowledge the complexity associated with the 'politics of scale'. The local scale of change is not necessarily more manageable, or its actions likely to create a shared vision. Adaptation is reduced to performative tasks rather than connected processes, impacting the scope and effectiveness of change on ground. Further, in this Australian case study, we see how local 'doing' is still subject to the cross-scale impacts of diminishing nation-state government resourcing reflecting the far-reaching consequences of small government austerity models, and the foisting of responsibility for adaptation to the least powerful and least resourced sectors of civic society. We conclude with the idea that if local adaptation is to lead to transformative outcomes that connect to a global transcendence to affect climate direction, systems of governance need to be linked to strategic visions that deliberately engage with the 'politics of scale', and to affirm more complex processes in engaging with the fluidity of a purposeful global-local nexus.