Overcoming adaptation myopia: Old tensions and new directions in measuring adaptation success
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Measuring adaptation success remains a deeply contested and politicised challenge in both research and practice. While efforts to define and evaluate adaptation success have proliferated, they often fail to grapple with deeper social, epistemological, and political tensions underpinning adaptation processes and outcomes. Unpacking how success is defined and measured becomes critical to avoid myopic framings and unlock more effective and just adaptation practices. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with leading adaptation experts across regions, disciplines, and sectors. With over 950 years of combined experience, these conversations illuminate the underlying tensions, uncertainties, and opportunities in defining and evaluating adaptation success. A prevailing tension re-emerges between success as process, focused on inclusive decision-making, adaptive governance, and effective implementation; and success as outcome, centred on equitable preparedness, maladaptation avoidance, and integration with development. Wicked problems around adaptation measurement converge around four enduring uncertainties, namely ontological-attributional, technical-methodological, spatial, and temporal. Addressing these problems requires legitimising qualitative methods and emphasising context-specific, continuous measurements that capture the intricacies of adaptation processes and outcomes. This research gets to the heart of ongoing debates about the politics of measurement – what gets measured, why, and by whom – and shows how adaptation uncertainties can be wielded to enable more effective and inclusive planning and practice. Rather than closing debates around what counts as adaptation success, we argue that its ambiguity can open possibilities – inviting scholars and practitioners to rethink what matters, challenge dominant paradigms, and create space for more just, context-rooted, and transformative futures.
Source: Climate Risk Management
Authors: Ana Terra Amorim-Maia, Marta Olazabal
Institutions: Basque Centre for Climate Change, Ikerbasque
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,130
OpenAlex ID: W7148712261