Description:
This book is the first to provide a focused examination of climate change adaptation in rural regions of the global South. By employing an interdisciplinary approach rooted in the traditions of political economy and political ecology, it argues that current approaches to climate change adaptation need to engage more systematically with the variety of power relations that shape the social and ecological parameters of rural livelihoods. It examines the contested narratives and practices of climate change adaptation in a series of case studies relating to four different agrarian settings in Asia: namely, Pakistan, India and Mongolia.
Review Quotes:
"Embedding his narrative in powerful empirical studies of extreme-weather events in India, Pakistan, and the Mongolian steppes, Taylor produces the most incisive and sustained interrogation to date of the society/climate binary inherent in much that is written on climate-change adaptation. His own strategy of reading climate from a materialist point of view will no doubt provoke and enrich debates."
Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA
"For those suspicious of global calls for "adapting" to climate change, Marcus Taylor provides ammunition and logic: an avalanche of detailed, intuitive, radical and compelling arguments and cases from around the world. For advocates of adaptation, he offers a grim and sobering reminder of the politically-loaded and careless violence of the international development machine."
Paul Robbins, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
"Taylor's brilliant and pathbreaking new book explores the genealogy and construction of adaptation as a complex new field of knowledge and practice. It demonstrates how power, political economy and the production of vulnerability must be the foundations upon which new and radically transformative ideas and policies to combat climate change are constructed. A brave and important book."
Michael Watts, University of California Berkeley, USA
"This book provides a compelling answer for why it is that, although we know that climate change is a real and pressing issue, preciously little real change is taking place. It offers an incisive analysis of adaptation and what might be wrong with it."
Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester, UK