Tides of Knowledge, Currents of Injustice: A Critical Reframing of Coastal Climate Adaptation Justice in the Outer Hebrides

McGlade, Katriona (2025) Tides of Knowledge, Currents of Injustice: A Critical Reframing of Coastal Climate Adaptation Justice in the Outer Hebrides. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

How climate change is framed and understood is central to the way in which it is experienced and acted upon. This thesis responds to the growing literature in human geography, political ecology and critical social science challenging the apparent neutrality of climate change adaptation. Building on these debates, I critically engage with the processes of misrecognition and onto-epistemic injustice that shape the knowledges informing the definition and pursuit of ‘just’ climate adaptation. What we see is a form of maladaptation more broadly understood; not the failure of a specific intervention, but of the first principles associated with framing climate change as a ‘geophysical’ problem to be solved with technical expertise and economic assessments. Remedies have centred on calls for greater knowledge plurality and transformation. However, I argue that these activities are ineffective. Participatory approaches are subsumed into a depoliticised discourse where lived experiences are neutralised as inputs to predetermined ways of knowing and acting on climate change, and where just adaptation is conflated with standardised assessments of risk and vulnerability. I present insights on coastal adaptation from Uist in the Outer Hebrides as an archetypal example of misrecogntion and onto-epistemic injustice in climate change adaptation with broader relevance for rural coastal communities around the world. To remedy such injustices, climate adaptation requires a shift towards a recognition-centred approach, guided by attention to experiences of injustice, local knowledge systems and multivalent justice claims.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	02 Jun 2026 10:41
Last Modified:	02 Jun 2026 10:41
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103228
DOI:

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