Smart adaptation or data colonialism? Interrogating the role of digital technologies in climate adaptation

Highlighting a gap in adaptation studies regarding the role of digitalisation and datafication in environmental and climate governance, we argue for the need to critically engage with the ever-expanding experimental territory of smart adaptation . To accomplish this task, we emphasise the need to forge new alliances across the fields of digital geographies, political ecology, and political economy. We trace a genealogy of the discourse on smart adaptation and highlight how the basic premises on which mainstream approaches to adaptation operate ( neutrality and naturalization ) have been articulated through digitalised approaches since the very outset (through the ‘climate service paradigm’). This articulation relies upon the need of ever-expanding data supplies, the creation of data relations across scales and space, and the transformation of data into a source of value. Foregrounding the figure of the ‘smallholder farmer’ in adaptive development, we outline three modalities through which smart adaptation operates: depoliticization , financialization and experimentation . Finally, we call for the need to put adaptation scholarship in dialogue with the emerging field thematizing data colonialism as an analytic device to shed light on extractive processes of datafied capital accumulation and dispossession which stem from the conjoined coloniality of climate change and digital infrastructures.