Climate adaptation can quietly drive urban displacement

New research shows that, in many cities, climate adaptation policies are quietly functioning as tools of dispossession, pushing marginalized communities off valuable land while framing removal as environmental necessity. Far from passive victims, affected residents are responding with subtle but persistent forms of resistance that reshape both urban space and the law itself.

These findings are presented by socio-legal scholar Ana Maria Vargas of Lund University in the study Quiet Sabotage: Resisting Climate Adaptation by Dispossession and Its Laws, published in the journal Human Geography. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Cartagena, Colombia, the study exposes how climate adaptation narratives are mobilized to legitimize evictions and neglect, while documenting how residents of self-built neighbourhoods resist through everyday practices The author describes as "quiet sabotage."

When climate adaptation becomes a tool of dispossession

Governments and international institutions increasingly frame climate adaptation as a neutral, science-driven response to environmental risk. Flood maps, land-use regulations, and ecological restoration plans are presented as necessary to protect cities from climate impacts. The author's research shows that, in practice, these tools often operate selectively, protecting elite areas while marking informal settlements as disposable.

In Cartagena, a coastal city facing sea-level rise, flooding, and subsidence, climate adaptation policies have designated large areas of self-built neighbourhoods as high-risk zones. These classifications are used to justify eviction threats, denial of basic services, and exclusion from infrastructure investment. Homes built under conditions of poverty and long-term state neglect are rebranded as environmental liabilities rather than communities deserving protection.

The author introduces the concept of adaptation by dispossession to describe this process. Adaptation by dispossession occurs when climate risk narratives and legal frameworks are used to legitimize the removal, exclusion, or abandonment of marginalized populations, while consolidating land and resources for state authorities, private developers, or tourism interests. The study shows that climate adaptation, rather than correcting historical inequalities, often reproduces them through new environmental justifications.

In Cartagena, residents describe a pattern in which flood defenses, drainage systems, and seawalls are constructed in wealthy districts and tourist zones, while low-income areas receive eviction notices instead of infrastructure. Risk mapping becomes a technocratic language that masks political decisions about whose lives and livelihoods are worth protecting.

Similar dynamics have been documented in cities across Latin America, Asia, and North America, where climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction policies trigger relocations that sever communities from jobs, social networks, and urban opportunities. The author's work adds a legal and ethnographic dimension, showing how adaptation policies are embedded in broader systems of land control and urban governance.

Quiet sabotage as everyday resistance to climate governance

While adaptation by dispossession is often framed as inevitable, the research shows that affected communities are not passive. Instead, residents engage in forms of resistance that are subtle, dispersed, and largely invisible to formal political arenas. The author conceptualizes these practices as quiet sabotage, based on theories of everyday resistance.

Quiet sabotage does not resemble protests or court challenges. It operates through small, continuous actions that undermine state narratives and disrupt planned removals. In Cartagena's self-built neighbourhoods, residents raise land levels using debris and waste to reduce flood exposure, directly challenging official classifications of their areas as uninhabitable. They incrementally construct and reinforce homes without permits, making eviction logistically and politically costly. They reconnect water and electricity after disconnections, asserting permanence despite legal exclusion.

These practices are frequently labeled illegal or environmentally harmful. The author's analysis shows that they are also adaptive strategies rooted in necessity and collective knowledge. By altering landscapes and infrastructure, residents are adapting to climate impacts on their own terms, filling the gap left by absent or exclusionary state action.

Quiet sabotage also extends to environmental practices. In some areas, residents selectively cut mangroves to create space for housing while replanting them elsewhere to perform ecological stewardship. These actions complicate official narratives that portray informal settlements as purely destructive to ecosystems. Instead, they reveal competing visions of environmental care shaped by survival, proximity, and lived experience.

According to the study, quiet sabotage is not random or individualistic, it is cumulative. Over time, these practices transform flood-prone land into stable neighbourhoods, normalize informal service connections, and make removal politically difficult. They also expose contradictions in climate governance, where laws criminalize survival strategies while failing to deliver meaningful protection.

The author argues that quiet sabotage should be understood not as deviance but as a form of political agency in contexts where formal participation is inaccessible or ineffective. These actions contest the assumption that adaptation must be imposed from above and reveal adaptation as a lived, negotiated process.

How everyday resistance is reshaping the law from below

The author shows that quiet sabotage does not merely resist legal frameworks; it actively reshapes them. Through persistent everyday practices, residents produce what she describes as legality from below.

In Cartagena, decades of informal construction, land occupation, and service connection have overwhelmed the capacity of authorities to enforce exclusionary laws. Over time, these practices force recognition. Informal settlements that were once deemed illegal become candidates for regularization, service provision, and legal protection. Court decisions increasingly acknowledge that informal housing is not merely unlawful occupation but the result of systemic failure to provide adequate shelter.

The study traces how repeated acts of quiet encroachment gradually erode the legitimacy of eviction-based adaptation strategies. When communities remain, rebuild, and reconnect despite enforcement attempts, the law is compelled to respond. This process challenges the idea that legality flows only from formal institutions. Instead, legality emerges through practice, persistence, and collective presence.

The argument is based on legal pluralism, meaning different legal rules operate at the same time. State law is not the only source of legitimacy. Community norms, survival practices, and everyday adaptations generate alternative legal realities that compete with official frameworks. In climate adaptation contexts, this pluralism becomes especially visible as residents resist being classified as illegal or unadaptable.

The study also warns against romanticizing resistance. Quiet sabotage can redistribute risk unevenly within communities and contribute to environmental degradation. However, The author argues that these contradictions reflect structural abandonment rather than moral failure. When adaptation policies prioritize land value and ecological aesthetics over human security, residents are forced into imperfect solutions.