Contesting adaptation regimes: community agency and resistance in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Maldives

Adaptation regimes are historically and socially specific configurations of power that shape potential responses to climate change. They frame the landscape that communities must navigate, contest, and re-work to adapt. However, adaptation scholarship has insufficiently examined how communities respond to these regimes across diverse political economic contexts. Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Maldives, this paper traces how adaptation regimes manifest through imagination, experimentation and dispossession, and how communities engage and contest them through diverse strategies. Through analysis of 110 semi-structured interviews, observation, and documentary analysis of academic, policy, and media reports, we show how resistance emerges in multiple forms including constrained accommodation, strategic engagement, confrontational opposition, and deliberate withdrawal. These configurations are neither fixed nor mutually exclusive as communities simultaneously inhabit multiple modes and shift strategies as circumstances evolve. Ultimately, our findings reconceptualise adaptation regimes as complex and creative fields of struggle through which communities continuously negotiate power and enact alternative climate futures.