The biopolitics of adaptation to a changing climate: Constructions of the adaptive capacity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

Abstract

I interpret the policy and practice of adaptation to the impacts of climate change as a contemporary site of biopolitical governance which has, since its emergence with modern biology in the eighteenth century, taken as its central problematic the interaction of human populations with their environments. Based on a Foucauldian analysis of policy and research texts about adaptation in a group of people identified as particularly vulnerable to climate change, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, I argue that currently dominating this space is a discourse centred on building adaptive capacity through practices of caring for country. Deriving from systems ecology an understanding of adaptation as a natural, autonomous process within the social-ecological system, this discourse makes possible a powerful alternative representation of Indigenous peoples as uniquely resilient in the face of climate change impacts.

I argue that the discourse of adaptive capacity, which promises an integrated approach to the study and governance of the challenges of climate change, is a product of the pragmatic holistic logic of the concept of the ecological system. Incorporating critical perspectives about the social and political dimensions of human adaptation into a biological framework, it underpins a governmental vision of transformative adaptation driven by empowered communities. This discourse also naturalises adaptive capacity as an inherent property of the Indigenous community engaged in caring for country, however, recovering functionalist constructions of adaptive human systems long abandoned in the disciplines of geography and anthropology.

In the context of Indigenous Australia this discourse presents both opportunities and limitations. While it represents a valued recognition of a long history of engaging sustainably with environmental change and promises to open up roles in natural resource management across the continent, it also threatens to displace a more historical reading of vulnerability to the impacts of climate change as an effect of the colonial processes of dispossession and marginalisation, and the claims on the state that the latter might support. I explore the ways in which the functional circularity of the construction of adaptive capacity of the social-ecological system thus circumscribes the politics of climate change adaptation.