University of Tasmania
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Agency, social networks, and adaptation to environmental change

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-03-19, 01:49 authored by Michele L Barnes, Sarah Sutcliffe, Innocent Muly, Nyawira Muthiga, Stephen Wanyonyi, Petr Matous, Michael MurungaMichael Murunga
Environmental change is escalating across the globe, threatening the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions of people. Substantial effort and resources have been committed at a global scale to support adaptation projects in affected communities to confront these changes. Yet not everyone has equal capabilities to adapt, guide adaptation decisions, and contribute to envisioning alternative futures. Drawing on theories of agency, social networks, and adaptation and employing a unique time-series dataset including 653 individuals across five Kenyan coastal communities, here we examine how agency over adaptation decisions is socially differentiated and the disparities that exist regarding who is able to bolster their level of agency over time. Our results show that involvement in local environmental decision-making processes, where adaptation to environmental change is negotiated, is strongly associated with feelings of effective power. Yet this power is largely concentrated among older individuals, community leaders, those with greater assets, and those with social ties to leaders – pointing to existing social hierarchies and resource differentials that drive adaptation decisions. The only significant predictor of changes in agency over time was network exposure: individuals with direct contact with those who were actively involved in environmental decision-making (individual agency) were likely to become more involved themselves; yet contact with passively involved partners (proxy agency) led to decreases in agency over time. Our results suggest a dynamic ripple effect in agency through social networks, suggesting that social networks can both catalyse and inhibit perceptions of effective power over adaptation decisions through participation in environmental decision-making. Our findings underscore the importance of social networks in enabling and constraining agency, highlight the role of leadership and power dynamics in environmental decision-making and locally led adaptation, and provide a foundation for future research on fostering inclusive and just adaptation.

History

Publication title

Global Environmental Change

Volume

92

Article number

102983

Pagination

102983

ISSN

0959-3780

Department/School

Fisheries and Aquaculture

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication status

  • Accepted

Rights statement

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/).