Overcoming adaptation myopia: Old tensions and new directions in measuring adaptation success

• Defining and measuring adaptation success is a wicked and deeply political challenge • Current evaluation efforts are often myopic, ignoring complexity and diverse realities. • We interview 50 experts to unpack tensions and new directions in measuring success. • Findings revisit the process-outcome split, adding nuance on equity and effectiveness. • We outline ways forward to navigate persistent adaptation measurement uncertainties. 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 new directions 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 context-rooted and transformative futures.