Private companies have in recent years started to disclose information about their exposure and responses to climate risks. However, we still know little about how and why private actors engage in climate change adaptation, and to what extent they do so in ways that improve societal resilience. This article addresses these questions. It conceptualizes private adaptation as consisting of institutional, infrastructural and community-oriented responses to climate risks. It develops a political-economic framework about the drivers of private adaptation, where private adaptation is expected to be shaped by pressures exerted by governments, investors, and civil society actors. Empirically, the framework is explored by using an original dataset on the adaptation responses of the 37 largest mining companies worldwide. We select the mining sector as mineral extraction plays a critical role in the low-carbon transition, and can, at the same time, exacerbate climate vulnerability in extracting sites. The descriptive findings suggest that the majority of the investigated companies have set up procedures to assess climate impacts on business operations, integrated climate risks in water governance, and adapted their infrastructure. The explanatory results indicate that private adaptation is mainly driven by investor pressures, and not domestic regulations and civil society. By implication, companies rarely engage in community-oriented adaptation responses by cooperating with local communities in ways that would benefit these communities. Taken together, our findings help to better understand the limitations of private adaptation and barriers to achieve transformative change, and identify how private adaptation could help improve societal resilience.

This paper approaches maladaptation in the political economy context of development pathways in in Brazil and analyzes one of the most controversial climate change strategies – bioenergy. The article aims to shed light on how and why bioenergy continues to be so prominent in climate policy, despite adverse side effects associated with its expansion across different dimensions like adaptation, food security, land degradation, and deforestation. It is well known that large-scale bioenergy expansion erodes different environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Nevertheless, in countries like Brazil, bioenergy is institutionalized as a flagship climate strategy aimed to cut down transport-related CO2 emissions. These limitations to such bioenergy expansion have serious implications for climate change governance and sustainable development, but conventional approaches have not addressed these limitations sufficiently. This article addresses this research gap using a critical development pathways approach to bioenergy and treats it as a maladaptive strategy. I propose an analytical framework that analyzes how different ideas, interests, and, institutions interplay in the historical institutionalization of bioenergy as a climate strategy. The analysis shows that bioenergy institutionalization has been driven by the endemic economic crisis in the sugar sector and governmental interests associated with security and developmental imperatives. The unsustainable co-evolution of development pathways and bioenergy, marked by deforestation, land colonization and agricultural expansion, have narrowed the adaptative space in agriculture. Current climate policy has moved towards path-dependent maladaptive strategies like bioenergy. Paradoxically, framing bioenergy as a climate strategy has been useful to justify more expansive policies in favor of the sugarcane industry. Bioenergy has also been used to greenwash Brazilian climate policy in international climate governance.

In this study I address the political economy of vulnerability and adaptation to climate variability in the Uruguayan livestock sector. The research paper contextualizes vulnerability and adaptation pathways within wider governance structures running the agricultural sector. I address how vulnerability is historically shaped by wider processes of agrarian structural change observed during the last decades.  I use a political economy perspective and an historical institutionalist methodology to explore changes and continuities in the ideas, institutions, and interests. This triumvirate rationalizes the agricultural regime. From this approach, the analysis of vulnerability to climate variability is situated within the context of agricultural governance. An empirical analysis of the agricultural regime is used to examine the role of ideas, institutions, and interests in the structuration of the sector.  The study compares two different periods of agricultural governance which in theory are characterized by sharp ideological differences: the neoliberal and neo-structural periods. This comparative analysis reveals how the structuration of the agricultural regime overwhelms the capacity of different governments to tackle the root causes of vulnerability in the livestock sector. The inquiry reveals the politico-economic roots of vulnerability and how the sedimented structure of the agricultural regime constrains transformative adaptation strategies to climate variability and change in the agrarian sector of Uruguay.  The capacity of the agricultural regime to constrain transformative changes tackling the roots of vulnerability transcends the colors and the political capacity of the governments in control.    

This study analyzes if adaptation and water governance can operate effectively to tackle vulnerability to water risks in socio-political environments structured historically to maximize extractive rents.  The research focuses on the case of mining in Peru. Peru is a paradigmatic case, given its long mining history and its abundant endowments of minerals subject to high international demand. The country’s history is characterized by tensions between mining expansion policies and environmental and water resource protection. The paper uses a political economy perspective to investigate how water risks and vulnerabilities are historically shaped by wider processes of economic governance, which are based on extractive development pathways. I explore how such governance processes influence water management and adoption of particular adaptation pathways nowadays, addressing the wider structure of the mining regime where governance of water resources and adaptation responses to climate change are problematized. The methodology is based on a historical institutional approach to analyze the conflation of ideas, institutions, and interests, vis-à-vis the structuration of the Peruvian mining regime. The analysis shows that the expansionist extractive regime is the main locus of water-related vulnerabilities. This is evidenced by the regime rationalizing water governance and adaptation pathways to climate change according to economic growth imperatives based on extractive development.