8. Political Limits to Climate Change Adaptation Practices: Insights from the Johannesburg Case

Urban planning can play a potentially meaningful role in adapting cities to the effects of climate change. This, however, requires that planning itself changes in such a way that anticipated effects of climate change can be addressed, in addition to environmental risks to which cities are exposed today. In particular in the global south, adaptive planning options need to be mediated with responses to considerable pre-existing development challenges. This paper explores how the adoption of adaptive planning options is politically feasible in Johannesburg, a highly polarised metropolitan city in the global south. It brings to light political challenges in reconciling adaptation and development needs, both in potentially synergistic and non-synergistic options, and it outlines their potential implications for the possibility to realise local adaptive practices. The intention of this paper is to contribute to an emergent body of work that will progressively offer clearer insights into the extent to which adaptation practices are politically feasible, especially in cities with democratically constituted governments where negotiated prioritisation is required.