Climate change adaptation as social navigation: Insights from Kenya’s drylands

• Pastoralists in Africa’s drylands face multiple social and ecological challenges and changes. • The article applies the concept of social navigation to explain their climate change adaptation. • We show that actors need to develop social positions that align with contexts of change. • This foregrounds micro-level complexity, tactical praxis, and the role of non-material assets. Many studies explore climate change adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on how climatic and ecological variations, in combination with available resources, shape actors’ options for adaptation, with growing recognition of the significance of political, social, and economic factors. This article argues that the concept of ‘social navigation’ adds to our understanding of the everyday, enabling work of adaptation. Looking at three cases of pastoralist climate change adaptation in Kenya, the social navigation concept takes pastoralists’ perspectives and foregrounds micro level agency. It contributes to the extensive literature by highlighting adaptation outcomes as shaped by the ability of actors to change and develop social positions based on limited knowledge about changing social, climatic, and ecological conditions. This demands new forms of relations and interactions as well as continual considerations of alternative possibilities and challenges. The lens of social navigation, we find, emphasises climate change adaptation as a tactical praxis emerging from actor’s changing ideas, actions, relations, and positions in an interplay with the changing surroundings to overcome immediate needs and in endeavours to secure longer-term stability. We show that successful adaptation is likely when affected actors can change and develop social positions to align with new opportunities made available from the changing contexts.