1  Introduction

Climate change has become a central part of North-South relations. Even after the American withdrawal from all foreign aid, climate finance has reached its goals (CPI 2025). While there has been a lot of written on the need for climate finance, the state of it and what it ought to include, the scholarship on what it is on the global level, is less developed.

Climate adaptation is one of the three pillars of the UNFCCC, and the one most closely related to development aid. Here, institutional approaches dominate, with central actors being the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) coordinating large flows of multilateral aid.

The changing climate impacts ecosystems, and it is through this disruption that climate damages could manifest themselves. These ecosystem services are ubiquitous, and the impact should they disappear is uncertain and full of risk. What is certain, is that the risk of large scale human suffering, is large (Calvin et al. 2023).

The large and unknown scale of these ecosystem risks makes climate adaptation something that could be present in any field, and at any scale. While they naturally impact the ecology, this can have follow on effects on the economy, on government, on health and virtually all other sector of life. This unknown future has to be managed in some way, and the current approach by WB and IMF, is to have the countries draw up NAPs where they draw up the next 30 to 50 years of policy.

These plans are a prerequisite for receiving climate adaptation funds from multilateral money pots (Mizuno and Okano 2024). Because of their scope, the plans cut across all sectors and deep into the future, they are policy documents that hold a lot of power. Understanding their content is thus central to understanding how the vulnerabilities and human suffering is going to be avoided.

1.1 Research questions and approach

The research questions are thus:

What is climate adaptation? Who decides?

  • What are the NAPs about?
  • Where do the plans come from? Who’s plan is it?
  • Is this justice?

Beyond concerns about vulnerability and suffering, two observations motivated this study. First, arguments that oil-producing countries like Norway should continue extraction while directing portions of profits toward Global South adaptation (Holden and Hoel 2024) raise fundamental questions about what adaptation enables. Does funding adaptation justify continued emissions?

Second, initial readings of specific NAPs revealed puzzling omissions and contradictions. The Marshall Islands plan largely excludes their substantial diaspora population, despite migration being central to their climate reality (WB and RMI 2023). Palestine produced a comprehensive adaptation plan while under occupation, raising questions about sovereignty and planning (State of Palestine and Smithers 2016). These examples suggested that NAPs might serve purposes beyond climate response—performing statehood, accessing finance, or legitimizing other agendas. Such observations prompted the broader investigation into what adaptation planning actually accomplishes.

This thesis employs post-structuralist concepts such as epistemicide (Santos 2016) and alternative development (Escobar 2018) to analyze climate adaptation discourse. However, the goal is not to compare knowledge systems or propose more effective solutions. Indigenous knowledge systems are their own field of study (Figueroa-Helland and Raghu 2016; Figueroa-Helland, Lindgren, and Pfaeffle 2016; Figueroa-Helland and Lindgren 2016; Stewart-Harawira 2015; Whyte 2018), as are pluriverse-approaches to design and society (Escobar 2018, 2020). While these perspectives inform the analysis, directly engaging them lies beyond this thesis’s scope. A methodological tension exists in the search for alternative knowledge in a system that picks the most prominent one. The methods employed in the thesis are not able to catch counter-voices, subversion of the discourse, or other actions taken against the hegemony found.

Rather, the aim is to make climate adaptation strange (Li 2007). By stepping back and examining how it operates as a system of governance, what it renders visible and invisible, and whose interests it serves. Making climate adaptation strange means exploring it not as a natural or inevitable response to climate change, but as a particular way of organizing knowledge, resources, and power that could have been otherwise.

This thesis also tries to understand climate adaptation as the new ‘dominant problematic’, the interpretive grid through which the world is known and acted upon (Ferguson 1994, 19). Just as ‘development’ became the lens through which the Global South was understood in the twentieth century, ‘vulnerability’ and its antidote ‘resilience’ now structure how we comprehend global inequalities.

1.2 Chapter overview

Chapter 2 situates climate adaptation within the international climate governance system. For decades, countries have negotiated how to respond to climate change through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC divides climate action into three main pillars: mitigation (reducing emissions), adaptation (adjusting to climate impacts), and loss and damage (addressing irreversible harms). Understanding this architecture is important, as the categories shape what kinds of climate responses are possible, who will pay for them, and how developing countries must frame their needs to access support.

Chapter 3 reviews two competing perspectives on adaptation planning, the ‘adaptation nexus’ approach seeking technical solutions and Paprocki (2018)‘s ’adaptation regime’ critique revealing colonial continuities. As climate adaptation is being mainstreamed into development practice, the chapter draws on development scholarship to understand these competing views. The institutional approach sees development as genuine response to real problems, and the role of the international community to bring technical expertise and resources to help communities realize their potential. The critical approach examines how development interventions, despite the good intentions of development professionals, reproduce dependencies and impose external frameworks that compete with local realities. These perspectives offer different explanations for why National Adaptation Plans might converge around similar themes globally.

Chapter 4 details the methodology used to get the data for the analysis. The chapter explains how structural topic modeling can reveal patterns of convergence and divergence. The challenge is to analyze 47 lengthy policy documents, with a combined word count of 2 030 660 systematically without losing important insights. Traditional qualitative methods would require months of manual coding and might miss patterns only visible at scale and through statistical testing. Computational text analysis, specifically structural topic modeling (STM), offers a way to let the corpus reveal its own structures, showing what countries talk about when they discuss adaptation and whether they all talk about the same things.

Chapter 5 presents the data from the STM, finding high discourse centralization across all categories with variations by income level, region, and geography. The structural topic model identified 8 topics that structure adaptation discourse, with technical topics dominating across all categories. The findings show all country groupings above baseline. Most surprising, regional institutional networks exert stronger influence on discourse than either climate vulnerability or income level. Low-income countries show the highest group effects despite moderate dominance, suggesting that financial dependency constrains how poor countries can imagine climate adaptation. These patterns provide empirical hints for the theoretical concerns raised in Chapter 3 about epistemological convergence in climate governance.

Chapter 6 discusses these findings through the lens of critical theory. It argues that while adaptation is a part of the international frameworks for climate justice, adaptation might as well operate as epistemicide that forecloses alternative futures by rendering adaptation technical, rather than political. The discussion explores what the NAPs reveal about climate governance, not just what they contain, but what they exclude. The dominance of technical topics suggests adaptation is being rendered technical in ways that eliminate political discussion. The stronger influence of regional institutions over geographical realities indicates that administrative networks matter more than climate vulnerabilities. The relationship between economic status and discourse domination suggest how financial dependency might shape epistemological possibilities. These patterns suggest NAPs ability to deliver climate justice is problematic, as climate planning documents could be performances of institutional competence designed to access international finance.

Chapter 7 returns to the thesis’s central questions about adaptation and power. The analysis reveals a troubling distribution of risk in climate governance. While adaptation interventions carry the inherent risk of maladaptation, and loss and damage mechanisms struggle with liability and responsibility, the only risk-free approach would be upstream, preventing emissions at source. Yet the portfolio architecture enables the opposite, treating risky downstream interventions as substitutes for emissions reduction. If climate adaptation operates as a portfolio option that can substitute for mitigation, fundamental questions about justice remain.