Murray Scown

With sea-level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather events threatening communities, ecosystems and built infrastructure alike, climate change adaptation is pressing. This remains true in high-income countries where research capturing power dynamics underpinning adaptation continues to develop with implications for how policy and exclusion can be understood. Through a systematic review, the state-of-the-art concerning climate adaptation politics in high-income countries is analyzed, identifying n = 31 articles from Scopus and Web of Science. Key literature findings include a dominance of technical-scientific narratives with possible consequences for community exclusion and an implicit acknowledgement of actor network importance. This review expands conceptually around power dynamics relevant to narratives and inclusivity in adaptation politics through a governmentality framework that could usefully foreground the identification and analysis of cross-scale power dynamics implicitly identified by the literature, but which remain open to more explicit development. Governmentality could thereby facilitate enhanced understandings of adaptation power, politics and networks, which research and policy have recognized as important yet been slow to address within high-income countries possessing climate vulnerabilities.