From Practice to Transformation: Regrounding Community-Based Adaptation in Critical Realism

Community-based adaptation (CBA) has become a credible remedy to climate change adaptation, emphasizing local participation and community-defined priorities. However, its transformative potential remains limited when structural root causes of vulnerability are insufficiently addressed. This article argues—via the methodology of problematization—that aligning CBA with the broader agenda of social-ecological transformation requires a stronger philosophical foundation. We propose critical realism as a suitable philosophy of science to translate CBA’s emancipatory ambitions into a robust analytical and methodological practice. Critical realism is a practically oriented philosophy facilitating causal analyses coherent with its realist ontology and relativistic epistemology. It illuminates the interplay between agency and structure, enhancing CBA to confront power imbalances and systemic injustices while supporting local agency. By conjoining insights from political ecology and political economy, we show how critical realism offers analytical coherence, methodological robustness, and normative orientation for transformative adaptation practice. We delineate nine key synergies between critical realism and CBA that together provide the conceptual scaffolding for a politically powerful, reflexive, and justice-oriented adaptation science. In doing so, the paper contributes to rethinking CBA as not merely a localized coping mechanism but as part of a structural response to the social-ecological crisis.