Climate change adaptation is receiving growing policy attention worldwide, and it is now widely accepted that consideration of the impacts of climate change must be routinely incorporated into the policy-making process across diverse areas from disaster risk management to land use planning and healthcare delivery. This paper presents a study from Australia – one of the regions of the world most exposed to the impacts of climate change – and examines adaptation policy with respect to a subpopulation widely considered to be one of the most vulnerable to climate change: Australia's Indigenous peoples. As is the case elsewhere in the world, there are currently moves to mainstream climate change into the design and delivery of infrastructure, programs and services targeted at Indigenous communities.
Building upon a growing body of research concerned with the governmentality of climate change, this paper explores the negotiation of adaptation policy for this diverse and geographically disparate population, with its unique political demands and fraught settler-colonial relations with non-Indigenous Australia. It presents the results of a post-structuralist analysis of the discourse of adaptation, examining what it means for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be adaptable and resilient in the face of climate risks. It suggests that attempts to foster resilience obscure the difficult decisions and trade-offs that are frequently involved in integrating climate change concerns into existing Indigenous policy objectives, where adaptation competes with other priorities for attention and resources.
