Jamie Allison Haverkamp

This critical climate ethnography stories the struggle for local Andean adaptation designs under conditions of climate coloniality. The extinction of myriad species, rapid loss of alpine glaciers, acidification of mountain waterways, and failed harvests are the daily struggles of those living on the frontlines of climate change in Quebrada Quilcayhuanca. “Quilcayhuanca” – a single valley in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountains and the ancestral homelands to 240 agropastoralists, is the place in which this ethnography is grounded. In the wake of climate devastation, this book traces how the mainstream, ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) plan designed for Quilcayhuanca summons the resurgence of land grabs and territorial struggles through a (re)valuation of landscapes and new green credentials. Drawing upon theory from decolonial political ecology, feminist science and technology studies, and indigenous and postcolonial studies, this book illuminates the coloniality of mainstream adaptation and asserts a feminist and anti-colonial proposal for thinking and doing “adaptation otherwise”. Learning from the place-based teachings of campesinos of Quilcayhuanca, adaptation otherwise takes root in indigenous and agrarian knowledges and ethics of care – offering an intervention to the coloniality of adaptation-as-usual.