Brackish waters can be found in transition zones between freshwater rivers and saltier seas. These dynamic coastal landscapes harbor multiple functions such as housing, agriculture, nature, and industry. Because of climate change, existing borders between fresh and saline water - and between land and water - are becoming contested. Extreme rainfall, typhoons, heat waves, and droughts occur more frequently and are expected to intensify. Shifting water levels and chloride concentrations affect which livelihoods and land use practices can be sustained in the future.

Land use transformations may be needed to adapt to climate hazards such as flooding, drought, and sea-level rise. Climate risks can be reduced when people or infrastructures are moved out of areas exposed to climate hazards. Examples of these so-called exposure reduction measures are zoning, managed retreat, buy-outs, the elevation of the water table in agricultural land or projects such as the Dutch Room for the River program. However, land use changes are often contested by the people currently living and working on those lands.

This dissertation aims to contribute to the debate about just transitions in climate adaptation and land use transitions in the Netherlands and beyond. Anticipating climate risk also means anticipating conflicts about what to protect and what to let go. Not everyone will agree about the necessity of these adaptation measures, nor about what ‘just’ climate adaptation actually means at the local level. This research therefore describes the prevalence of competing justice claims in multiple adaptation controversies. At the same time, this dissertation further develops a capabilities-based approach to climate adaptation ethics.@en

Land use change, managed retreat, and relocation programs are examples of exposure reduction measures in flood risk management (FRM). Exposure reduction measures are especially prone to conflict at the local level due to competing interests, values, and attachments. In this paper, we build upon the capability approach to justice and specifically the concept of political capabilities to advance justice in exposure reduction measures in FRM. A capabilities-based approach to justice helps to recognize the multiplicity of valuable ways of life and addresses a wide range of inequalities including concerns related to recognition justice. The innovation of our capabilities-based approach to justice is that we include both actors who have too little political influence as well as those who have too much and can thus excessively steer FRM in their advantage. A political capabilities analysis is different than a focus on principles or rights because it draws attention to realized political influence and includes the informal stages of FRM politics such as lobbying. The political capabilities concept also shifts the focus from vulnerability to human agency, thereby addressing concerns in the FRM literature about the loss of self-determination and misrecognition. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the opportunities and limitations of using the political capabilities concept in FRM.

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Coastal megacities all over the world face challenges related to climate adaptation, ecosystem protection and inclusive development. In response, governments develop high-level and long-term climate adaptation plans to guide coastal development. In Metro Manila, a consortium of Dutch and Philippine consultants developed the Manila Bay Sustainable Development Master Plan (MBSDMP). The planning team stressed the importance of inclusive and participatory planning, yet, the pre-set premises of the masterplan, such as the high-level and long-term planning scale and corresponding problem formulation, determined which justice claims were foregrounded in the project, disadvantaging small-scale fishing and informal settlement communities. ‘Justice’ is a contested concept. Hence, we deploy a critical theory and politics of expert knowledge lens to investigate how struggles over competing justice claims unfold in water development planning. The scalar politics as manifested in the MBSDMP planning process hides particular conceptions of justice while privileging others in congruence with the larger scale uneven political-economic development dynamics. We provide three examples of scale framing in the planning process that functioned to legitimize the contested displacement of informal settlements by pointing to economic development, disaster risk reduction, or environmental protection. Planning design choices involving scalar out-zooming enabled the uptake of these justice claims, while backgrounding the justice claims of negatively affected groups: namely, the urban poor and small-scale fishing communities. The case analysis provides conceptual-empirical insights relevant for coastal cities' grassroots and policy action platforms anticipating climate change impacts and strategizing their stance in the politics of climate adaptation planning.@en

The capability approach is increasingly presented as a promising approach to address questions of justice in local climate adaptation. In an attempt to integrate environmental protections into the capability approach, Breena Holland developed the meta-capability Sustainable Ecological Capacity to establish substantive ecological limits. This article, however, empirically demonstrates that defining ecosystem thresholds in co-evolving systems is subject to conflict and continuous negotiation. Taking the Haringvliet dam in the Dutch South-West Delta as an illustrative case, this paper shows how people uphold different views about the Haringvliet’s most desirable ecosystem state. Future shifts in the socio-ecological system, such as decreased fresh water availability and sea-level rise, are expected to uproot today’s compromise about chloride levels in the Haringvliet. This suggests that anticipatory water management should not only address climate impacts, but also prepare for re-negotiations of established ecological thresholds. The associated politics of climate adaptation deals with questions about which functions to protect, at what costs and for whom. Hence, it is critical to integrate procedural justice and attention to political inequalities in capabilities-based adaptation justice frameworks.@en

It is often assumed that climate adaptation policy asks for new responsibility arrangements between central government and citizens, with citizens getting a more prominent role. This prompts the question under which conditions these new responsibility arrangements can be justified as they may raise serious ethical concerns. Without paying due attention to these ethical concerns, climate adaptation policy may be unsuccessful and even be considered illegitimate. This paper aims to address this topic by exploring some examples of climate adaptation responses and their associated ethical challenges. The examples from the water domain differ in terms of their primary beneficiaries and the extent to which they are prone to collective action problems. Discussion of the examples shows that any shift of responsibilities towards citizens should be accompanied by a governmental responsibility to make sure that citizens are indeed able to assume these responsibilities and a responsibility to see to it that the greater involvement of responsibilities does not create disproportional inequalities.

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