Towards Inclusive Climate Change Adaptation: A Framework for Ethical and Practical Integration

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Promoting inclusion has been an on-going concern in several contexts, including international development, governance, urbanization, innovation, education, and the workplace. However, in the context of climate change adaptation, the concept of “inclusiveness” remains comparatively underexplored, with no overarching conceptualization or framework available. As a result, we cannot systematically identify, from the viewpoint of inclusiveness, if we are making progress or if things are getting worse. This paper presents a framework and a set of practical performance indicators for discussion and for testing by practitioners.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

We base the framework on a broad ethical analysis that draws upon values of global and intergenerational justice, environmental and climate ethics, and workplace and policy ethics. This ethical analysis identifies four core components of inclusive climate change adaptation.

• (1) The foundations of an inclusive approach to climate change adaptation should be grounded in justice and caring in the broadest sense of these concepts, covering systemically marginalized groups, people in the future, and nonhuman actors while intensifying mutual acknowledgment of diverse cultures, values, and knowledge.
• Ensuring that (2) stakeholders for inclusive climate change adaptation require sufficient support to improve stakeholders’ capacities and the implementation of equity–diversity–inclusion (EDI) policies throughout organizations and communities involved in climate change adaptation.
• (3) Processes that develop broad collaboration and ensure transparency and accountability throughout climate change adaptation processes, from ideation to implementation, review, and learning.
• (4) Ensuring that all outcomes are viewed through inclusive concepts of success, monitoring, and evaluation, as well as improving accessibility to data and results.

We tabulated these core components against the common steps of logic models and derived nine priorities and fifteen indicators for understanding, implementing, and evaluating inclusive climate change adaptation policies and practices. This research, thus, not only provides a foundational concept for inclusiveness in climate change adaptation, but it also provides a practical framework by which to guide policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in this critical endeavor.

Read the paper — Framework and proposed indicators for the comprehensive evaluation of inclusiveness: the case of climate change adaptation by Ha Pham and Marc Saner.