Why history matters to planning: Climate change, colonialism & maladaptation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Preparing for the future remains an enigma: Climate change is worsening and communities are already overwhelmed by disastrous impacts. Adaptation planning has the potential to prepare communities, yet adaptations are often maladaptive, having the unintended effect of increasing vulnerability. Maladaptation begets maladaptation, leaving communities trapped in maladaptive path dependencies (MPDs). Tracing maladaptation backward in history reveals how MPDs are deeply rooted in settler colonialism. This issue cannot be addressed by simply increasing adaptation efforts today. Exploring alternate paths may be the only means forward. Indigenous worldviews provide insight into ways of relating people and place beyond the colonial status quo, producing contextual, effective adaptations. Deep and personal biocultural relationships enable better understanding of complex socio-ecological systems, more accurate knowledge and, critically, adaptive learning. Currently, MPDs and extractive knowledge practices render adaptation co-management impossible: Indigenous Knowledge is appropriated to further development goals, erasing Indigenous Leadership and, in the process, hobbling adaptive learning. In this short perspective article we explore the temporal relationship of spatial planning, the impact of climate change and the urgent need for transformation. In particular, we showcase how in order to effectively address climate vulnerability, adaptation planning must first reconcile the historical roots of MPDs and ongoing Indigenous injustice. • Maladaptation is increasing vulnerability to climate change. • Historical decisions perpetuate maladaptation through maladaptive path dependencies (MPDs). • Indigenous worldviews predate MPDs formed during settler colonialism. • Biocultural relationships empower adaptive learning and resilient decision making. • Colonial institutions maintain MPDs by erasing Indigenous Knowledge and Leadership.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it