Quiet sabotage: Resisting climate adaptation by dispossession and its laws

In this article, we examine how climate adaptation policies can operate as mechanisms of dispossession, displacing marginalized communities under the guise of environmental protection. We introduce the concept of ‘adaptation by dispossession’ to describe how interventions framed as responses to climate-related hazards justify forced removal, exclusion and the reallocation of land and resources. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes gathered in Cartagena, Colombia, we illustrate how climate adaptation narratives and policies are portraying self-built neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas as ‘high-risk zones,’ legitimizing neglect and providing justification for evictions. However, residents are not passive in terms of adaptation and they engage in different forms of resistance, including quiet sabotage, contesting dispossession and adapting on their own terms. Their resistance brings not only material gains, such as the possibility to access housing, but also legal gains that bring recognition, access to services, rights and land tenure. Through a process of quiet encroachment of the law residents of self-built neighbourhoods use quiet, but constant and proacted actions to build and shape the law from below. Our study contributes to climate adaptation debates explaining the mechanisms behind Adaptation by Dispossession and by revealing how marginalized groups resist through everyday practices that generate legality from below.