2 Context
This chapter explains how international climate governance operates through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its three main pillars: mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. Climate change presents both biophysical and political challenges that require a global response. Understanding how the UNFCCC attempts to manage this provides the context for examining the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs).
The first section traces climate change as a biophysical process, following the cascade from greenhouse gas emissions through ecosystem disruption to human impacts. It then examines how the UNFCCC emerged to address these challenges through its evolving institutional architecture. The second section explores the political dimensions of climate governance, examining how it operates through interventions, shapes North-South dynamics, and enables trade-offs between different response options.
Together, these sections establish climate adaptation as neither purely technical nor purely political, but rather as a domain where technical frames and political projects meet in the global South. This context is essential for understanding how National Adaptation Plans function, both as attempts to solve political problems and to govern relations between countries. The technical appearance of these plans may well obscure their role as instruments of control, a dynamic the rest of the thesis will explore.
2.1 Climate change and the three pillars
This section explains climate change as both a biophysical process caused by greenhouse gas emissions and a political process governed through the UNFCCC. It traces the cascade from emissions to human impacts and examines how the international community structured its response through evolving institutional frameworks.
The pathway from emissions to impacts follows a cascade of interconnected processes. Greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from fossil fuel combustion (approximately 85% according to IPCC estimates) and land-use changes including deforestation (approximately 15%), accumulate in the atmosphere (Calvin et al. 2023). These gases trap heat, altering energy balances and driving changes in temperature, rainfall patterns, extreme weather and rising sea level. The resulting climate changes disrupt ecosystems at multiple scales, from local habitat shifts to global circulation patterns, such as the Gulf stream.
Ecosystems provide essential services, like food and water, that human societies depend upon to function. As well as regulating services like flood control, cultural services tied to identity and place, and supporting services that maintain the conditions for life itself (Pascual et al. 2023). Rising temperatures shift species ranges and disrupt ecological relationships. Changing precipitation patterns affect water availability and agricultural productivity. More frequent and intense extreme events damage infrastructure and overwhelm natural buffers. Ocean acidification threatens marine food webs while sea-level rise inundates coastal ecosystems, with mangroves and their associated ecosystem services particularly vulnerable (Brander et al. 2012).
Agricultural systems face shifting growing zones, altered pest and disease patterns, and increased weather variability. Water resources become less predictable, with some regions experiencing intensified droughts while others face increased flooding. Coastal communities confront erosion, sanitization, and storm surge risks. Mountain communities, often overlooked in climate assessments, face unique challenges as changing precipitation and temperature patterns affect water provision, hazard regulation, and cultural services that mountain ecosystems provide (Grêt-Regamey, Brunner, and Kienast 2012).
The distribution of these impacts both create and reinforce fundamental inequities in the climate crisis. Those least responsible for emissions often face the most severe consequences (Williams 2020). Small island states that contribute negligibly to global emissions confront existential threats from sea-level rise. Sub-Saharan African countries with minimal industrial emissions experience intensified droughts and food insecurity. Meanwhile, industrialized nations with high historical emissions possess greater resources to buffer climate impacts through infrastructure, technology, and financial reserves. This inverse relationship between responsibility and impact shapes the political economy of climate governance.
The international community’s response to climate change organized in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This treaty established the institutional architecture for global climate governance, creating annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) where nations negotiate collective responses. Over three decades, this framework has evolved from initial focus on emissions reduction to encompass a more comprehensive approach addressing both causes and consequences of climate change (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016).
The UNFCCC structure follows the logic from these ecosystems. Mitigation addresses the root cause by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sinks. Adaptation manages unavoidable impacts by adjusting natural and human systems to actual or expected climate effects. Loss and damage, formally recognized in the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2016, recognized that some climate impacts are beyond adaptation, and will require compensation or support for irreversible losses (Roberts and Huq 2015; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016; Wallimann-Helmer 2023).
This three-pillar architecture emerged through decades of negotiation, reflecting evolving understandings of climate change and shifting power dynamics between nations. Since the UNFCCC is a consensus based forum, all countries have to agree for an agreement to be reached (Hall and Persson 2018). Another founding principle is that of Common, but differentiated responsibility (CBDR), where richer countries in the global North, with their historical emissions and current wealth, should bear a larger cost of climate action. The agreement included a list of countries in each group (Williams 2020).
Initially, the climate regime focused almost exclusively on mitigation, treating emissions reduction as the primary response. Developing countries, recognizing that some global warming was already locked in regardless of mitigation efforts, successfully pushed for adaptation to gain equal status. The 2010 Cancun Agreements formally established adaptation as the second pillar, creating institutional mechanisms like the Adaptation Committee and National Adaptation Plans process (Hall and Persson 2018). The system for mitigation was revised in the Paris Agreement, for legally binding emission cuts, to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). These also included countries in the global South (Hall and Persson 2018).
Loss and damage followed a particularly difficult path. The concept emerged from small island states in the early 1990s but faced sustained opposition from developed countries fearing liability claims. Only after decades of advocacy, including walkouts and diplomatic pressure at successive COPs, did loss and damage achieve recognition as the third pillar in the 2015 Paris Agreement (Roberts and Huq 2015; Janzen et al. 2021; Brun 2016). Even then, developed countries insisted on language explicitly excluding liability and compensation in the outcome documents (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016).
Thus, each pillar represents a different version of the climate problem and its solutions. Mitigation frames climate change as a collective action problem requiring coordinated reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Success is measured through quantifiable metrics: tons of CO2 equivalent reduced, renewable energy capacity installed and forest hectares protected. These clear metrics enable comparison across countries and sectors, supporting market mechanisms like carbon trading and results-based finance. The technical nature of mitigation aligns with dominant approaches in environmental economics and engineering, with their own criticisms (Wilhite and Salinas 2019).
Adaptation is harder to measure (Persson and Remling 2014). Unlike emissions reductions where the goal is a global benefit, adaptation is a local process (Hall and Persson 2018). Thus, successful adaptation varies dramatically through-out the world, with drought-resistant seeds in one location, flood defenses in another, and possibly institutional reforms elsewhere. This diversity resists standardization, making it difficult to compare adaptation efforts or determine appropriate funding levels.
Recent scholarship increasingly recognizes that adaptation has limits, thresholds beyond which adjustment is no longer possible or becomes prohibitively expensive (Mechler et al. 2020). These limits may be ecological; species cannot migrate fast enough, technological; there is no available solution, economic, claims resources that are needed elsewhere, or social; changes conflict with values. It also works as a possible threat from, or a side payment to, the smallest and most vulnerable countries (Hall and Persson 2018). Recognition of adaptation limits strengthens arguments for both aggressive mitigation and acknowledgment of loss and damage, challenging the notion that societies can simply adapt their way through any level of climate change (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016).
Loss and damage introduces questions of justice and compensation that the technical frameworks of mitigation and adaptation attempt to avoid (Wallimann-Helmer 2023). By acknowledging that some climate impacts cannot be prevented or adapted to, loss and damage opens discussions about historical responsibility, reparations, and liability that developed countries have long sought to prevent (Roberts and Huq 2015; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016). The language in current agreements provides recognition without clear obligations, creating what amounts to an “empty pillar” that is acknowledged in principle, but without substance (Janzen et al. 2021).
The UNFCCC framework thus embodies a fundamental tension. It provides essential institutional infrastructure for global climate cooperation, creating spaces for negotiation, knowledge exchange, and resource mobilization. The three-pillar structure acknowledges different dimensions of the climate challenge and creates pathways for action. Yet this same framework channels responses through technical modalities that may inadequately address underlying drivers of emissions and vulnerability. The question is not whether technical approaches are necessary—they clearly are—but whether they are sufficient, and what their dominance might obscure or preclude.
Yet climate governance also creates spaces for contestation and alternative visions. Vulnerable countries leverage moral authority to demand action. Social movements challenge technocratic approaches with claims for climate justice. Indigenous peoples assert traditional knowledge and practices as adaptation strategies. Pacific Island states demonstrate how apparently powerless actors can shape global discourse through strategic diplomacy (Carter 2020; Corbett et al. 2020). These contestations show that climate governance is an ongoing struggle over futures rather than just a technical exercise in planning.
2.2 Climate adaptation
This section examines how climate governance operates through specific mechanisms and relationships. It explores how adaptation creates new forms of intervention, shapes North-South dynamics, and enables problematic trade-offs between climate responses.
As the adaptation frontier is movable, none of the technological, economic, social and cultural limits are a question of values, the adaptation process is a choice of tradeoffs (Roberts and Pelling 2018). This is an essentially political question, a question about what the future should be (Inayatullah 1990). It is also a central question in development studies (Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). There is thus considerable power in the ability to define what adaptation is, and what should be mitigation or loss and damage instead.
Considerable academic effort is spent defining these limits, and considering the trade-offs (Calvin et al. 2023). Each COP adds new mechanisms, funds, and frameworks attempting to bridge divides between developed and developing countries, between mitigation and adaptation priorities, between market and public finance approaches (Brun 2016).
This political process also gives rise to many frameworks, and complex mechanisms where countries try to avoid over-committing, and make sure others comply (Hall and Persson 2018). This also extends to climate adaptation, that currently is governed through non-binding pledges from countries at COP. Here countries pledge to give a certain amount of funds towards causes, such as climate adaptation, but their maintain a lot of freedom for how the funds actually will be dispersed.
The three-pillar architecture creates possibilities for trade-offs that reflect global power imbalances. In principle, the pillars address different aspects of climate change that require integrated responses. In practice, they become substitutes in a portfolio approach to climate action. Countries and institutions can choose emphasis on different pillars based on their interests or their views on effectiveness.
This portfolio logic enables problematic substitutions. High-emitting countries may prefer funding adaptation over reducing emissions, effectively paying to maintain fossil fuel consumption. The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage was established partly to prevent adaptation funds from being diverted to compensation. Yet the boundaries between adaptation and loss and damage remain contested, creating opportunities for reclassification that serves donor interests (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016; Roberts and Pelling 2018).
The economic framing of climate policy facilitates these trade-offs. Cost-benefit analyze compare mitigation costs against adaptation costs and residual damages. Integrated assessment models optimize resource allocation across response options. Carbon markets create equivalencies between emission reductions in different location (Eriksen et al. 2021).
The tension between maximizing collective welfare and respecting human rights illustrates these conflicts. Economic optimization might suggest that adaptation in densely populated, economically productive areas should receive priority. Yet this could abandon marginalized populations whose rights deserve equal protection. Similarly, cost-effectiveness might favor protecting existing development rather than transforming systems that produce vulnerability. The apparently technical choice of discount rates determines whose future counts in present decisions (Wallimann-Helmer 2023).
Developed countries prefer to channel adaptation finance through existing development institutions, maintaining control over resource allocation. Developing countries demand direct access and national ownership, rejecting paternalistic approaches that echo colonial relationships. The resulting compromise—multiple funds with different access modalities and governance structures—satisfies no one while creating transaction costs that consume substantial resources. Climate finance, as this process is called, is now higher that ever, with billions pledged (CPI 2025).
This complexity serves multiple functions. It provides space for different actors to pursue preferred approaches without directly confronting fundamental disagreements (Hall and Persson 2018). Countries can claim progress through various metrics—emissions intensity, renewable energy deployment, adaptation spending—without comparable benchmarks. The proliferation of climate funds allows donors to maintain control while appearing responsive to developing country demands. Technical work programs generate activity and expertise without requiring difficult political decisions.
The taxonomies that underpin this system are worked out by consultants around the world, and the funds for the production of the taxonomies can also be used for this (Gudmundsson 2024). Many countries spend a large portion of their aid on the knowledge production, a process that often happens in their own country.
This system is not very efficient. The transaction costs of navigating multiple funding mechanisms consume resources that could support implementation. The technical requirements for accessing climate finance favor countries with existing institutional capacity, potentially excluding those most vulnerable (Taylor and Harper 2014). The fragmentation of governance across issues and institutions enables forum shopping and reduces accountability. Most fundamentally, technical complexity obscures political choices about development pathways, resource distribution, and ecological limits.
The NAPs are state-centric frameworks (Mizuno and Okano 2024). This is not surprising, as the UNFCCC is an international arena, and states are the parties to the agreement (Williams 2020). The NAP process, established under the Cancun Adaptation Framework, represents a key mechanism through which global climate governance shapes national development trajectories (Mizuno and Okano 2024). Unlike project-based approaches of earlier adaptation efforts, NAPs require comprehensive, long-term planning across all sectors. Countries must assess climate risks, identify vulnerabilities, prioritize interventions, and integrate adaptation into development planning. This comprehensive scope makes NAPs powerful instruments for reshaping governance.
The NAP process also shapes state-society relations within countries. By positioning national governments as the primary actors in adaptation planning, NAPs may centralize authority over resources and decisions. NAPs thus become instruments through which states extend control over territories and populations in the name of climate response (Paprocki 2018; Ferguson 1994).
Since climate adaptation is a local process, there is also a real risk of misreading what is needed, or that an action harms more than it contributes to adaptation, a process named maladaptation (Schipper 2020; Eriksen et al. 2021). While some of these downsides will be the subject for later chapters, the risk is especially real for “green grabbing”, where land is taken for climate purposes. Forest peoples face dispossession from both climate impacts and climate interventions—a double exposure that governance frameworks fail to address (Wilhite and Salinas 2019). Indigenous communities find their territories targeted for carbon projects, renewable energy installations, and conservation initiatives that serve global climate goals while undermining local livelihoods (Dunlap 2018; Lyons, Richards, and Westoby 2014; Mousseau and Teare 2019). These interventions are justified through technical assessments of carbon sequestration potential or renewable energy resources, obscuring their political impacts on rights, sovereignty, and self-determination.
Maladaptive interventions may appear technically sound but fail to account for social and political contexts. Seawalls could protect wealthy areas while redirecting flooding to poor communities, drought-resistant crops could increase farmer dependence on corporate seeds. Planned relocation could destroy social networks all represent technically rational responses that may worsen vulnerability for some populations (Schipper 2020; Eriksen et al. 2021).