Quiet sabotage: Resisting climate adaptation by dispossession and its laws

Abstract

In this article, we examine how climate adaptation policies can operate as mechanisms of dispossession, displacing marginalized communities under the guise of environmental protection. We introduce the concept of ‘adaptation by dispossession’ to describe how interventions framed as responses to climate-related hazards justify forced removal, exclusion and the reallocation of land and resources. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes gathered in Cartagena, Colombia, we illustrate how climate adaptation narratives and policies are portraying self-built neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas as ‘high-risk zones,’ legitimizing neglect and providing justification for evictions. However, residents are not passive in terms of adaptation and they engage in different forms of resistance, including quiet sabotage, contesting dispossession and adapting on their own terms. Their resistance brings not only material gains, such as the possibility to access housing, but also legal gains that bring recognition, access to services, rights and land tenure. Through a process of quiet encroachment of the law residents of self-built neighbourhoods use quiet, but constant and proacted actions to build and shape the law from below. Our study contributes to climate adaptation debates explaining the mechanisms behind Adaptation by Dispossession and by revealing how marginalized groups resist through everyday practices that generate legality from below.

Introduction

Climate change is reshaping our world, and many communities worldwide are experiencing more floods, droughts and storms (IPCC, 2022). In response, governments and international organizations are creating policies and laws to help societies cope with the damaging effects of climate change, a process known as climate adaptation (Barnett et al., 2015; Berrang-Ford et al., 2021). However, climate adaptation policies, framed as neutral technical responses to rising hazards, are increasingly producing dispossession (Henrique and Tschakert, 2021; Quiroga Manrique et al., 2025; Warner and Wiegel, 2021). Millions of people are being evicted, displaced or stripped of their livelihoods in the name of flood protection, infrastructure development or ecological restoration (Meshkani, 2024; Warner and Wiegel, 2021). Far from neutral, these interventions often reinforce existing inequalities, protecting elites while labelling marginalized communities as illegal, disposable or unadaptable (Brink et al., 2025; Shah et al., 2025). Adaptation is a sphere where political and economic interests converge, and certain state and corporate initiatives often perpetuate extractivism and dispossession (Dunlap et al., 2024). During our conversations with residents of self-built neighbourhoods in Cartagena, Colombia they talked about adaptation as building sea walls for the rich areas of the city and evictions for those living on the margins.

Despite these processes of dispossession, forms of popular resistance against climate adaptation initiatives are emerging across the globe (Mills-Novoa and Mikulewicz, 2024; Vargas et al., 2024). Opposition to climate adaptation initiatives often remains quiet, hidden and less studied, but they are crucial to how vulnerable communities assert their right to remain, to live and to adapt on their own terms (Brink et al., 2023). We locate our analysis in these quiet forms of resistance against climate adaptation. Drawing on Scott's (1985) notion of weapons of the weak, we illustrate how residents of self-built neighbourhoods resist adaptation by dispossession through dispersed, everyday tactics that undermine state authority. We refer to these tactics as forms of quiet sabotage: practices that may appear illicit, but which strategically contest narratives of risk, eviction and illegality. These acts are often dismissed as illegality or criminality, yet they constitute collective strategies that allow marginalised groups to assert their autonomy and agency, while contesting exclusionary climate policies. As we will show, quiet sabotage, along with other tactics and practices is allowing residents of self-built neighbourhoods in Cartagena to gain formal recognition, housing rights and arguably climate adaptation on their own terms. Expanding Scott's insights, we show that quiet sabotage has not only social and material consequences, but also legal ones: it actively reshapes the boundaries of law, producing a form of legality from below.

We develop this argument through the case of Cartagena, Colombia, where low-income neighbourhoods surrounding La Virgen Marsh face state eviction orders under the banner of climate adaptation and ecological restoration. For years, local planning and land use policies have excluded marginalized communities, rendering their neighbourhoods and houses as illegal, despite their condition of extreme poverty and lack of access to housing. This exclusion has intensified through now under the banner of climate risks and adaptation policies. Inspired by David Harvey's concept of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004), we use the term ‘adaptation by dispossession’ to describe the process by which climate adaptation policies and technical risk assessments are mobilized to justify the exclusion, displacement or removal of marginalized populations from their territories. Previous scholars have used the concept of dispossession in the context of climate mitigation, adaptation and migration to describe how these interventions often frame certain populations as vulnerable or ‘in need of improvement,’ while producing sacrifice zones or surplus populations (Andreucci and Zografos, 2022: 3). In Cartagena, this occurs through the application of land-use laws, risk zoning and environmental planning policies that frame self-built neighbourhoods, constructed under conditions of poverty and systemic neglect, as illegal and more recently as unsafe because of climate change reasons.

Globally studies on the politics of climate adaptation have shown that many projects and initiatives are not protecting vulnerable communities, but reinforcing spatial inequalities and consolidating elite control over land (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Gomes, 2021; Sovacool, 2018; Williams et al., 2022). A study of Boston (USA), New Orleans (USA), Medellin (Colombia), Santiago (Chile), Metro Manila (Philippines), Jakarta (Indonesia), Surat (India), and Dhaka (Bangladesh) shows that land use laws and adaptation policies continue to reproduce vulnerability and maladaptation directly or indirectly (Anguelovski et al., 2016). A common strategy to adapt residents of self-built settlements is relocation, but this strategy has faced opposition, as residents loose access to jobs and social networks and often relocation premises do not reduce their vulnerability (Meshkani, 2024). Andreucci and Zografos, drawing on Foucault, show that adaptation acts as a security strategy that manages populations and territories to contain risks, making some groups disposable and continuing colonial development models under Western paradigms (2022: 6). Rather than protecting vulnerable communities, these interventions reinforce spatial inequalities and consolidate state or private control over land, often under the guise of ecological restoration, risk mitigation or climate adaptation (Thomas, 2024; Warner and Wiegel, 2021). While previous studies reveal how adaptation policies often reinforce dispossession, less attention has been paid to how affected communities resist and reconfigure adaptation on their own terms.

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2023, we provide a rich description of how residents in self-built neighbourhoods in Cartagena use different tactics not only to remain in place, but also to advance their claims to housing rights, collective recognition and the possibility of a better life. Among these tactics, we focus on quiet sabotage as a radical yet covert form of resistance that has been essential for these communities. The communities we engaged with, construct unauthorized infrastructure and strategically manipulate high-risk landscapes, using trash and debris to elevate the ground and reduce flood exposure. They break water and electricity networks, not only to access services but to assert permanence and disrupt the logic of planned removal. They also cut mangroves to make space for housing, while planting new ones along the periphery to perform ecological stewardship and challenge environmental narratives. These practices reveal how marginalized communities contest adaptation by dispossession and resist being reduced to bare life (Weißermel and Chaves, 2020; Wilton, 2021). As Esteva (2013) suggests, everyday practices of autonomy and self-organisation challenge-imposed development paradigms showing how communities create alternative ways of living and governing beyond state-led frameworks.

By analysing different forms of quiet sabotage, we show how silent, dispersed tactics function as powerful political acts that destabilize official adaptation frameworks producing material and legal consequences. Marginalised groups in Cartagena are reshaping norms, asserting rights, and generating a counter-legal order that challenge state-centred law in the context of climate adaptation narratives and policies.

Contesting adaptation by dispossession through quiet sabotage: theoretical implications

This section develops the conceptual framework we use to analyze the politics of climate adaptation, focusing on how policies justified in the name of risk reduction can dispossess marginalized groups and how these groups resist through practices we conceptualize as quiet sabotage. Finally, we explore how such practices not only contest adaptation by dispossession but also generate emergent forms of legality from below, challenging dominant legal frameworks.

Theorising adaptation by dispossession

We propose the term ‘adaptation by dispossession’ to critically examine how climate adaptation policies, often framed as neutral or beneficial, can serve as mechanisms for the eviction and exclusion for marginalized communities. David Harvey's theory of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ highlights how neoliberal capitalist policies centralize wealth and power by dispossessing the public and ordinary citizens from their wealth or land (Harvey, 2004). The term ‘accumulation by adaptation’ has also been used to explain how ‘political and economic elites profit from climate adaptation efforts’ (Thomas, 2024). Other terms such as ‘green dispossession’ (Dunlap et al., 2024; Ulloa, 2023) have also been used to refer to policies that use the climate crises to create profit while reinforcing inequalities. However, there is a need to theorize how climate risks are mobilized as rationales for dispossession in the context of urban adaptation.

Adaptation by dispossession builds on critical scholarship showing how climate adaptation can reproduce exclusion and inequality rather than protect the most vulnerable (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Bulkeley, 2021; Ribot, 2014). Dunlap et al. (2024: 453) argue that terms like ‘adaptation’ function as ideological tools that present climate interventions as neutral, necessary and benevolent, while concealing their role in advancing capitalist and colonial projects based on the dispossession and displacement of marginalised groups. Moreover, Andreucci and Zografos (2022) note, adaptation policies often operate through logics of enclosure and control, reinforcing colonial patterns of governance that frame certain territories and populations as expendable in the pursuit of climate security. We use the term to describe the process through which climate adaptation policies and narratives lead to dispossession by displacing residents via eviction, denial of services or exclusion from planning. This dispossession is justified through discourses of risk and resilience. Finally, as a result state or elites are able to consolidate land and resources under the guise of climate protection.

Adaptation by dispossession is confronted through different tactics of resistance that are legal and illegal, organised and quiet (Vargas et al., 2024). Resistance is commonly defined as an act to oppose power and domination (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). In contrast with overt and organised resistance (such as protest), everyday resistance often relies on small, hidden and symbolic acts that avoid direct confrontation (Scott, 1985). Research on quiet forms of resistance, inspired by the work of James Scott in The Weapons of the Weak (1985) helps uncover how adaptation by dispossession operates in practice, showing that when adaptation is framed as inevitable and benevolent, affected communities often resist subtly rather than openly, revealing the hidden tensions behind climate adaptation policies.

Quiet sabotage as a form of everyday resistance

Sabotage, traditionally perceived as mere acts of destruction, encompasses a broader spectrum of material strategies aimed at challenging and reshaping power (Taylor and Walton, 2001). The term sabotage is believed to originate from resistance against labour exploitation. In this context, it refers to the act of damaging equipment, machines and other types of infrastructure to resist oppression in the workplace (Ambrose et al., 2002). As an example, Sprouse (1992) relates how pineapple workers misused the cutting machines to cause their breakdown to get a work break in their ten-hour shifts. Unlike civil disobedience, which relies on public, nonviolent acts to make a moral appeal and expose injustice, sabotage operates covertly and seeks to materially disrupt systems of power rather than persuade through visibility and dialogue (Berglund, 2025; Lang, 1970).

In present times, sabotage is increasingly studied in relation to environmental activism, sometimes using the terms ‘ecotage’ (Plows et al., 2004) and ‘climatage’ (Delina, 2022; Gunderson and Charles, 2023) and it refers to actions aimed at disrupting environmentally harmful activities. The role of sabotage in climate activism is a subject of intense debate, with scholars examining the ethical, strategic and political implications of sabotage beyond destruction. Some scholars argue about the need to move beyond peaceful protest to direct action, including sabotage against fossil fuel infrastructure, due to the urgency of the climate crisis and the lack of action from powerful political and economic elites (Malm, 2021). In this regard, Gelderloos shows how historically social movements have used a diversity of tactics, including combative forms of resistance against oppressive systems to be able to achieve wider political transformations (Gelderloos, 2024).

While sabotage in climate action have caused interest in scholars and media because of the direct outcomes they generate in terms of material disruptions, the consequences of quiet forms of sabotage are less studied. These hidden, uncoordinated acts, often escape scholarly and activist attention but provide meaningful insights on people's needs and aspirations (Vargas et al., 2024). The resistance literature contains a lively discussion on whether quiet and uncoordinated tactics represent a form of political engagement or if they are simply coping or survival mechanisms for marginalised communities (Bayat, 2000). According to Bayat, we can analyse quiet resistance looking at its gains, such as the quiet encroachment of the ordinary to gain property rights and access to public services (Bayat, 2000). Thus, studying everyday forms of resistance, such as quiet sabotage can shed light into the competing rules and norms that operate in everyday life and the long-term transformations of society that are shaped from below.

Everyday resistance makes the law

Acts of everyday resistance do not necessarily seek to overthrow the legal system entirely. Instead, they operate within and against existing structures, reshaping them incrementally through lived practice. This echoes Scott's insight that resistance often unfolds ‘backstage’, where gossip, slander and sabotage mock the public order (Scott, 1985: 27). They may be dismissed by radical activist for taking too long or not having direct impacts. But it is precisely its embeddedness in everyday life and the cumulative effects that makes them powerful (Lilja and Vinthagen, 2018). These tactics assert autonomy, reconfigure state-community relations and open space for alternative legal imaginaries. In contexts where open confrontation is dangerous or impossible, such forms of resistance offer a pragmatic yet transformative path toward justice, one that is grounded in people current needs and aspirations.

Quiet sabotage offers a way to rethink climate adaptation not as a top-down technocratic project, but as a lived, contested process shaped by marginalized communities themselves. Drawing on Peter Gelderloos (2016, 2024) push for thinking beyond non-violent forms of pacifist resistance, we see that acts outside formal legality (often illegal), such as land occupation, or unauthorised infrastructure building can be relevant tactics for climate action. Gelderloos (2016: 267) emphasize that revolutionary change requires both combative and constructive strategies. His critique of non-violent protests and movements supports the idea that acts labelled as illegal, such as, ‘sabotage’ are an essential tactic of the oppressed. As, we will show later, practices of quiet sabotage can challenge exclusionary climate governance while asserting the right to remain, to build and to belong. Moreover, it is the disruption of the political governance of climate adaptation and its embeddedness in everyday life what makes them powerful forms of resistance.

More than allowing marginalised groups to survive and in some cases adapt on their own terms, marginalized groups can produce emergent legalities, parallel norms and practices that challenge dominant legal frameworks (Brink et al., 2025). This process unfolds within a framework of legal pluralism, where multiple normative orders coexist and compete (de Sousa Santos, 2006; Griffiths, 2003). Santos has conceptualized subaltern cosmopolitan legality as a process where grassroots construct alternative legal orders that challenge dominant state and global legal regimes (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, 2005). Similarly, Ewick and Silbey (1998), through their study of legal consciousness, show how individuals resist and reinterpret the law in everyday life, particularly through the narrative of ‘against the law’. Drawing on these insights, we use the idea of ‘legality from below’ to illustrate important consequences of quiet sabotage. Legality from below is a process that includes making the law obsolete, gaining de facto rights, securing legal recognition for specific claims and achieving broader reforms in the legal system. We analyse sabotage as a form of legal contestation, rather than mere defiance or vandalism, expanding the debate on legal mobilisation in climate adaptation. We offer an alternative path for accessing justice by those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change who often lack the time, resources and trust in the state to formally mobilise the law in courts or use democratic channels to express their needs and aspirations.

Methodology

We use a qualitative, ethnographic approach to explore how residents of self-built neighbourhoods in the Virgen Marsh in Cartagena, Colombia, resist exclusionary state narratives and urban governance practices that invoke climate risk to justify evictions, deny infrastructure upgrades and rights. Our methodology combines narrative analysis (Slembrouck, 2015) with ethnographic observations and informal interviews (Angrosino, 2007), represented through vignettes and short quotes that capture lived experiences, values and interpretations of cause and effect. While residents themselves talk about resistance in their daily lives, the category of quiet sabotage was added by us in our analysis.

Cartagena was selected due to its exposure to severe climate impacts, legacy of resistance against colonialism, and experience with innovative climate adaptation plans and policies. Cartagena, Colombia's fifth-largest city with a population of 1,088,000 in 2023, is located on the northern Caribbean coast and faces increasing climate risks, including sea-level rise, pluvial flooding and extreme heat (Stein and Moser, 2014). The city is historically known as ‘La Heroica’ (the heroic) for its defiance against Spanish rule, culminating in independence in 1821. Today, Cartagena is a major tourism hub, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a centre for industry and port activity. According to the city's ambitious adaptation plan (Plan 4C), a worst-case climate scenario for 2040 could see flooding threatening 28% of the population, 28% of industry, 35% of road infrastructure and 86% of historic centre, while erosion and sea-level rise could affect 70% of mangrove swamp areas and 100% of Cartagena's beaches (Alcaldía de Cartagena de Indias et al., 2014).

Fieldwork on resistance to climate adaptation was conducted in Cartagena from February–March 2022, with follow-up research in November 2023. The study focused on flood-prone areas known for self-built neighbourhoods and grassroots resistance. In 2022, 23 open-ended interviews were held with residents, leaders, officials, educators and politicians, using snowball sampling starting from a social media contact who helped us gain access after an initial meeting. Topics ranged from everyday problems and opportunities linked to their neighbourhoods, to violence, climate hazards, laws and adaptation measures. Ethnographic notes and transect walks (Aoki and Yoshimizu, 2015) through areas flagged by leaders as environmentally significant revealed different forms of resistance against state authorities and laws, and our analysis categorised some of the tactics used as quiet sabotage. Moreover, in 2023, nine focus groups involving 63 residents (51 women, 12 men) were organized as well as, a household survey to explore losses from frequent floodings and uses of the law in everyday life. Participants represented groups such as waste pickers, youth, renters, homeowners (with and without legal titles) and relocated residents.

Data analysis of the ethnographic fieldnotes followed a two-step process. First, an inductive coding phase identified key themes from the ethnographic material, with particular attention to narratives of resistance, its forms, motives and consequences. In the second phase, we categorized themes and applied deductive reasoning informed by climate adaptation and sociolegal theory to reflect on practices of resistance that could be categorized as sabotage. We employ ethnographic vignettes to illustrate these dynamics, offering transparency in research by capturing both field experiences and the interpretive work involved in translating them into academic analysis (Demetriou, 2023). This allows readers to step into the field alongside us and critically engage with the narratives presented. The data from the ethnographic fieldwork in 2022 and transect walks 2023 provided the main material used in this article, but it was complemented with key quotes from the focus groups. The focus group analysis, comprising 150 pages of transcripts, was initially analysed using Copilot, a data-secure AI tool endorsed by Lund University for research data analysis. Acknowledging AI's limitations in detecting subtle themes (Morgan, 2023), we extracted only targeted content based on the initial findings of our ethnographic analysis, which was done manually. Copilot helped identify excerpts where participants discussed infrastructure changes, legal control, rights and futures. We then conducted a manual analysis to ensure the data was correct, examining how individuals articulate their relationship to land and rights. Selected quotes were used to substantiate or critically engage with previous ethnographic findings. Additionally, Copilot refined the manuscript's language and grammatical accuracy.

In line with Lund University's ethical guidelines, we ensured free and informed consent, participant anonymity and non-harmful research practices. Ethical ethnography requires continuous reflection on potential risks posed by research, both to participants and to community dynamics (Madison, 2011). In the ethnographic fieldwork in 2022, we participated in everyday conversations and activities organised by community leaders. For these non-recorded conversations, we used oral informed consent, as the leaders preferred the activities to remain anonymous and informal. Written consent was obtained from focus groups participants in 2023, who were recorded using recording devices. After the transcriptions were done, all recorded material was deleted. We did not store any personal data for participants, and they are given pseudonyms in this paper. We actively discussed preliminary findings with social leaders, serving as a check against misrepresentation or unintended harm (Vargas, 2016). While individual leaders do not represent entire communities, their deep knowledge of local struggles and networks make them valuable interlocutors. In our case, leaders were often candid about internal conflicts, exclusions and the gendered dimensions of resistance, particularly in relation to women and children's vulnerability to climate impacts.

Findings: self-built neighbourhoods as sites of climate adaptation sabotage

In the neighbourhoods surrounding Cartagena's La Virgen Marsh, the fragility of housing is immediately visible, many homes are precariously perched on stilts, with wooden walls and metal roofs barely above the waterline. Just as striking is the omnipresence of trash. For outsiders, the large volume of waste, especially plastic, leaves a strong impression. Bottles, bags and wrappers cover the roads and clog the waterways, forming a patchwork that has become part of the everyday landscape. What may first appear as careless environmental destruction or unlawful land use, however, reveals something deeper.

Residents see their actions as a way of reclaiming the city, countering the narrative that self-built settlements are illegal slums and that adaptation hinges on their removal. As one resident puts it: ‘It's the poor who do the hard work of filling in land and gaining access to it. Then they are removed because it's “illegal occupation,” and later that land is used for luxury hotels and buildings’ (Transect Walk, 2022). This phrase reminded us of radical geography perspectives (Harvey, 2004), which argue that urban development operates through cycles of dispossession, where urban dwellers create value that is later extracted by elites. Quiet sabotage, as illustrated here, directly disrupts this cycle by preventing elite land capture and climate adaptation by dispossession.

Climate adaptation by dispossession

In Cartagena, climate adaptation is not experienced as protection but as neglect and displacement. Under the guise of risk maps and land-use laws that prohibit housing in flood-prone zones, adaptation has become a tool for eviction, especially in the self-built neighbourhoods surrounding La Virgen Marsh. In this section, we present the historical and legal context of climate adaptation in Cartagena and provide excerpts from empirical data that reveal how adaptation by dispossession is not just a policy failure, but a deliberate strategy that prioritizes elite interests while criminalizing the strategies used by marginalised groups to fulfil their needs and express their aspirations.

‘Cartagena is sinking’ was the headline of a major newspaper in Colombia in 2024. The article announced that climate change was causing sea-level rise in the Caribbean and predicted that the city would be underwater by 2100 (AFP, 2024). Scientists have warned about ‘subsidence-induced sea level rise’ as a major threat to the preservation of Cartagena, including the heritage architecture of the old town, the tourist sector and, most importantly, the living conditions of its one million inhabitants, especially vulnerable groups living near coastal areas (Restrepo-Ángel et al., 2021). High vulnerability to extreme weather events is not a future threat, but a long-time reality in the city. In the early 2010s, the National Government, with the support of international organisations, urged the local government to create an ambitious and pioneer Climate Adaptation Plan (Plan 4C, 2014) that would serve as a model for other cities in Colombia, but also globally.

The 4C Plan was published in 2014 as a policy to guide the actions of different sectors, including the urban planning office. It identified zones, such as La Virgen Swamp and the historical centre, highly vulnerable to climate-related hazards. The creation of the Plan 4C followed an international development recipe for successful participatory planning: stakeholder engagement played a key role, with private sector, NGOs and local communities highly involved. People in informal settlements were invited to several meetings, the local government was empowered to determine the goals in the plan, and international consultants and experts provided advice. Meanwhile, political instability was very high during the time the Plan 4C was designed. Between 2012 and 2018, Cartagena had ten different mayors, and the political culture was heavily affected by corruption, particularly regarding the assignment of construction licenses in a city, where the land was already scarce and expensive.

The legal framework governing climate risk and land use in Cartagena is complex. At the international level, the Paris Agreement 2015 established the global goal on Adaptation (Art7) stipulating that all countries should have National Adaptation Plans that integrate adaptation into land use, water management and risk management. Colombia adopted a National Adaptation Plan (2012) that includes local and regional governments as key actors of effective climate governance and promotes measures such as early warning systems and sustainable land-use practices to lessen the impact of climate events.

Plan 4C included a project called ‘Adapted Neighbourhoods’, which motivated our initial selection of Cartagena to study climate adaptation in informal settlements. The plan foresaw a Pilot in the neighbourhood of Boston, by the Virgen Marsh. Boston had emerged as an self-built settlement around 50 years ago. Like many other settlements, it was built haphazardly, harming the ecosystem by cutting mangroves and filling flood-prone areas with trash and debris. However, when we arrived in Cartagena in 2022, no adaptation project had been implemented in Boston and residents were afraid of possible evictions. We asked Fernando, who worked for many years as an urban planning advisor, about the reasons why the 4C plan was not implemented, especially the Boston project. He mentioned how, the part of the plan led by the private sector was getting implemented, such as the improvement of the ports. The elites have moved their contacts in the capital and secured funds from the national government to finance the projects that benefit them. ‘But the plans for people in the slums, no one will advocate for them’, he said (Interview 2022).

Despite widespread recognition of climate change and the need for adaptation, the identification of risks seldom leads to protective actions from the government, especially in self-built neighbourhoods. In this case, the risk zone classification, and the fact that residents are not formal owners of the land and have built their houses without legal permits, are cited as a reason to halt adaptation because the government could not adapt neighbourhoods that in paper are illegal. Thus, one of the first conclusions from the 2022 fieldwork was that climate adaptation projects were not really happening in practice, but risk maps and climate narratives were used as a technocratic strategy to legitimize inaction and exclusion, masking a deeper logic of abandonment. Here, the most vulnerable are left to adapt alone, or be removed in the name of environmental protection.

Quiet sabotage and adapting from below

While global actors continue to meet at international Climate Conferences, in Cartagena and other cities around the world thousands of people engage in actions that could be seen as sabotage when they degrade the environment with debris and trash, or cut the mangroves. They engage in activities labelled as illegal to provide for their urgent need of housing, access to water and work. In a context where climate adaptation is mobilized by the state to justify eviction and dispossession, residents are developing their own tactics to secure housing, services and protection against floods.

Upon our first visit to the Virgen Marsh, one of the social leaders proudly took us to see a large mural painting of Afro-Colombian women and a sign of resistance that reads ‘Women from Olaya standing their ground’ (Transect Walk, 2022). He explained how this area historically served as a refuge for people living in poverty, those internally displaced by the armed conflict, and rural–urban migrants seeking housing and livelihood opportunities. Over the years, families have occupied the land, constructing their own homes and gradually, the area has evolved into a large urban residential zone. Some parts have been formalized, with residents obtaining property titles and many houses have been improved, with bricks and solid floors, while large areas remain informal lacking formal land tenure.

Ecological sabotage: raising land levels with rubble and waste to physically alter risk classifications and cutting mangroves

One of the most widespread tactics used in self-built neighbourhoods in Cartagena is landfilling, which is done by raising ground levels in wetland areas using construction debris, sand and garbage. This practice directly challenges government classifications of areas as high-risk flooding zones, it also challenges the legal prohibition of building without a legal permit, and the criminal law prohibition of dumping waste. However, the practice of landfilling allows residents to reduce the negative impacts of floodings (adapt) and assert their right to stay. A resident describes the process of land creation and adaptation to floodings:

You bring trash if you are poor or if you have some more money, you can buy debris from large construction sites. There are trucks that get paid to take the debris out of the city, but they sell it to us for 60.000 pesos. This practice is illegal of course, but the government is never here, and it is difficult to control. If you really want a good filling, you need debris, but also sand from the coastal area, this helps you to sanitise the land. But many poor people can’t afford that, so they only use trash. (Fieldnotes, 2022)

In La Magdalena, Consuelo, a long-term resident, explains how she raised the ground around her house by 80 cm to get protected against flooding. Initially, her home was surrounded by water, but years of filling transformed the neighbourhood into a stable, liveable area. Another resident explains how they must take the problem of flooding into their own hands. She said, ‘If we wait for the government to fix the streets, we’ll drown first. That's why people raise their houses with debris.’ (Transect walk, 2023). Another resident explains: ‘The government builds seawalls downtown and drainage systems for hotels, but for us, there's only eviction. We’ve managed to control flooding without their help, but they won’t recognize it’. (Focus group with long term residents, 2023)

Frustration with the adaptation policy sometimes leads to the threat of more overt sabotage. During fieldwork in 2023 we witnessed heavy rains and floods and residents took us to a place where water accumulates. Alicia, a local leader, showed how mangroves growing in the rainwater canal trap plastic waste, stopping the water flow and worsening the floods. She mentioned how they will have to ‘cut the mangroves in front of the police’ to draw attention to the problem, since authorities had ignored their formal requests. The statement captures both desperation and defiance in a context where adaptation through mangrove conservation appears more focused on attracting tourists than protecting residents.

Institutional sabotage: incremental construction without permits and land titles to avoid detection and formal eviction processes

In Cartagena, residents of informal settlements engage in incremental construction to circumvent eviction and gradually gain access to housing and land. Without legal permits or formal land titles, they strategically build in small, successive steps, starting with temporary structures, later reinforcing walls, and expanding homes as financial resources allow. By settling in areas officially classified as uninhabitable and constructing homes without permits, residents challenge legal frameworks governing urban expansion and force authorities to recognize their settlements and allow them to gain the right to housing. Julio, an academic and environmental activist interviewed in 2022, clarified why, despite the illegality of the land invasion and environmental degradation, the authorities do not manage to act:

We here constantly violate the environmental laws; the prosecutor does not investigate these crimes seriously. The police have more than 1000 open processes for illegally occupying the territory, but those processes don’t go anywhere. The law is useless and the ones making the law are those occupying the territory. What starts as an informal settlement gets consolidated and we start seeing bigger and bigger houses, more sophisticated, more powerful. (Interview, 2022).

In the same fieldwork, we met with residents who had accessed housing in this way. Mabel, a young mother of four, recently lost her husband and moved to a house she built with her own hands. She began by placing four poles on the ground during the dry season to claim land, using a practice locally known as the ‘law of the four poles’. She used wooden planks for walls and saved money to install a metal roof. However, when the rains came, her house was flooded. To counteract this, she filled the land with old tires and garbage, eventually elevating the floors (Fieldwork Notes, 2022).

Similarly, Carmen, a long-time resident and social leader in La Magdalena neighbourhood, describes how she and her husband initially invaded land covered by mangroves and water. Over time, they dried the land using construction debris and garbage and cut the mangroves. Her house, which started as a wooden structure, is now a solid brick home, and she secured legal land ownership in the late 1990s when The President of Colombia came to Cartagena. While legalization brought services such as sewage and garbage collection, it also introduced financial burdens as utility costs rose.

The cases of Mabel and Carmen illustrate how incremental construction and long-term community efforts can lead to eventual legalization. The quote by Julio shows how such quiet encroachment over time manages to render the law ‘useless’ in a city where the number of investigations for illegal land invasion overwhelmed the power of the police. There is also an informal land market, ‘People buy land with papers they make themselves, but the community respects them. I paid 20,000 pesos for my piece of land, and I’m still here 35 years later’ (Focus Group with long term residents, 2023). By gradually developing housing and infrastructure, residents disrupt state planning and challenge policies that reduce climate adaptation to imposed displacement. Their actions reveal how climate adaptation is shaped not only by formal strategies but also by grassroots interventions that redefine land tenure and urban governance. The incremental encroachment and the police failure to control the territory are manifestations of building legality from below; it renders state law ‘useless’ over time and forces a de facto recognition of their right to housing, challenging the state's monopoly on defining what is legal.

Infrastructure sabotage: illicit service connections to counteract state neglect in risk zones

While official adaptation plans emphasize long-term resilience and risk reduction, they often fail to address the immediate needs of residents. Another example of sabotage targeting public service infrastructure is the widespread practice of illegally connecting homes to water and electricity networks. Tapping electricity from poles can overload the grid, leading to power outages and potential damage to transformers and other infrastructure. This form of direct-action challenges state policies that deny access to essential services after their designation as high risk and illegal.

During a visit to Playas Blancas, Mabel took us to see her house. She pointed to the thin wires running from her home to a main electricity line: ‘We all do it. You connect to a friend's cable or tap into the line directly. Otherwise, we have no light, no fridge, nothing’ (Fieldwork notes 2022). Similarly, water is accessed through informal extensions of pipes from nearby neighbourhoods. This community-organized distribution allows families to secure basic services despite the government unwillingness to meet basic needs. Often driven by necessity, these actions can also be understood as a form of quiet sabotage, as they subvert state control over essential services and expose the exclusionary nature of infrastructure governance. Even without physical destruction, although in some cases the infrastructure is also damaged, these practices disrupt the power dynamics embedded in the regulation of access to urban services.

Adaptation from below

Sabotage is frequently dismissed as criminal or disruptive, or a desperate response to poverty or displacement. Yet it can also be understood as a deliberate strategy of adaptation that allows marginalised groups to provide for their current needs while resisting state forms of adaptation. By staying in these informal settlements, they are not only speculating about the possibility to gain legal rights in the future but also dealing with the uncertainty of adaptation responses that could either recognise their rights or simply erase their homes.

Javier, a social leader, explains why many refuse to leave their land: ‘We want to see relocations in our own territories and improvements to our neighbourhoods. To take you out of your territory is to put you out for violence and leave you in places without economic activity’. (Transect Walk, 2022). For residents of self-built settlements, climate displacement is not neutral, but a tool of state-driven gentrification. Their resistance, therefore, is not only about rejecting relocation but about asserting their right to shape the future of the city. Similarly, Sandra a long-term, elderly resident, describes past forced evictions in the neighbourhood of Chambacú, where the government promised ecological restoration but built commercial developments instead. She said, ‘They told us we needed to leave because the land was not good for housing and had to be restored. But now, there's a large commercial building there. We are used to being displaced by armed groups, but in this case, it was the state’. (Interview 2022)

Previous experiences of state dispossession are still in the memory of older residents who learnt how to resist and reshape what is seen as liveable, legal and possible. During fieldwork in 2023, we met residents of a relocation project for people displaced by the Popa Hill landslide. Residents mentioned that people that gain access to relocation were only few and that people were not sure about the relocation project, so they preferred to send their young children to occupy the old lands, which were now also occupied by migrants from Venezuela. So, while relocation favoured few in comparison with the large number of people in need of housing, relocation is considered by both government officials and residents themselves as an uncertain solution. For the government, it is expensive, for the people it is a lottery, as one never knows if the government will act and if one will benefit, as projects are often co-opted by political elites to benefit their voters.

During our fieldwork (both in 2022 and 2023), we also met different environmental grassroots working to re-plant mangroves, improve garbage collection and mitigate hunger. They engaged in food fairs, cultural events and environmental stewardship activities to shape their environment, asserting their right to stay and challenging narratives of these areas as only places of environmental degradation and risk. Even seemingly small expressions of place attachment reflect this deeper struggle. In a youth focus group (2023), when asked what they liked most about their neighbourhood, they laughed and responded in unison, ‘la recocha’. This colloquial term, meaning playful, carefree fun, highlights how marginalised spaces, are sites of social cohesion, joy and resistance. For some, these actions are also about recognition and pride. One resident described their efforts to restore local ecosystems: ‘We want to bring tourism to this area to show our work to recover the swamp and see the mangroves and birds. We want to feel proud in front of our kids’ (Interview 2022). This is more than environmental stewardship; it is a reflection on alternative community visions. Residents see the future not as one of displacement, but one of gaining legal recognition and redistributing the gains of economic development in their own terms.

By staying, they create a place where they can fulfil their present needs, but at the same time residents disrupt the state's vision of urban development, turning everyday life into a form of sabotage against imposed displacement.

Discussion: Conceptualising adaptation by dispossession

We conceptualise Adaptation by dispossession as the process through which climate adaptation policies and projects, while presented as measures to reduce risk and enhance resilience, function to displace marginalized communities and reconfigure access to land, housing and resources. This concept helps us to highlight how adaptation often operates through three interrelated mechanisms. First, it justifies an intervention using discourses of climate risk, protection and sustainability. Second, because of climate-related risks the adaptation intervention justifies displacement, evictions or exclusion of vulnerable groups from assets, rights and resources. On the long term, this intervention consolidates territory, infrastructure or ecological assets for states, elites or private capital. The concept thus explains how climate adaptation can reproduce historical patterns of inequality, turning the climate crisis into a new frontier of dispossession of marginalised communities.

The case of Cartagena makes visible how adaptation by dispossession operates in practice. The city's climate adaptation policies frame self-built neighbourhoods in flood-prone areas as ‘high-risk zones’ that are not apt for urban development. This discourse of risk reduction constitutes the justification mechanism, legitimizing state neglect while masking the political and economic interests behind them. These policies translate into displacement. Residents of self-built neighbourhoods around La Virgen Marsh are threatened with eviction, denied services, or excluded from urban planning processes. By branding their homes as illegal and unfit for climate adaptation, the state delegitimizes their claim for a dignified life in this territory, paving the way for their removal. Finally, the dispossession becomes clear in the long term when reclaimed land is often repurposed for elite tourism development, luxury housing or ecological conservation projects that serve external interests. This was exemplified with the previous evictions from La Popa Hill, the place is now occupied by a large government building. Rather than protecting the most vulnerable, adaptation reconfigures urban space in ways that consolidate state and private control, while pushing marginalized groups further to the periphery.

The case of Cartagena is not isolated and similar examples exist in other parts of the world, with governments invoking scientific authority to legitimise the violent removal of self-built neighbourhoods and livelihoods (Arnall, 2014; Saputra et al., 2025). In Jakarta flood-control projects have been used to justify evictions of informal settlements (Shatkin, 2019: 209) and in Manila disaster risk reduction has been mobilised to clear riverside communities (Bankoff, 2003). In Cartagena the language of resilience and climate science is co-opted into longstanding strategies of urban inequality and exclusion. We found that climate adaptation narratives and land governance are far from addressing the structural drivers of vulnerability (as argued by Ribot, 2014), these interventions deepen them, reinforcing the precarious position of those at risk. As Dunlap et al. (2024) and Andreucci and Zografos (2022) argue, climate adaptation and mitigation often reproduce colonial patterns of control and create ‘green sacrifice zones,’ where security and development discourses justify dispossession and render certain populations expendable. This article adds to the previous research showing how the framing of adaptation as a legitimate environmental goal delegitimises resistance by portraying those who oppose adaptation as irrational or backward, and obscures the dispossession and violence embedded in these processes.

Residents of self-built neighbourhoods confront adaptation by dispossession through acts of resistance and quiet sabotage. When authorities frame the homes of residents of self-build neighbourhoods as ‘high-risk zones’ that must be cleared, residents undermine this narrative by materially transforming the landscape. They resist by raising the land levels with rubble, replanting mangroves, and reinforcing houses against flooding. They built their own parks and mobilised the community for clean ups, community food festivals and self-made neighbourhood upgrades. These acts of resistance align with recent literature describing processes of climate in-mobilities and the claim that adaptation can, and does, take place in situ (Bernasconi, 2025; Thornton et al., 2023). In Cartagena, despite threats of eviction and denial of services, communities continue to build, expand and improve their homes, often without permits. By repeatedly re-occupying space and re-connecting to electricity or water even after disconnection, they frustrate attempts to make their settlements disappear. In doing so, they transform displacement into persistence. Land reclaimed by residents on the edges of the Marsh, often dismissed as ‘illegal’, is quietly converted into liveable territory. This prevents the state or private developers from fully appropriating strategic land for elite housing or tourism projects.

Practices of everyday resistance to climate adaptation are not necessarily organized, yet they are assertive, strategic and deeply rooted in lived experiences of marginalization. These everyday strategies align with James Scott's (1985) concept of everyday forms of resistance and what Bayat (2000) calls ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’, reflecting a form of opposition to power that is often invisible to formal politics but able to advance certain claims. These acts are not only defensive but creative: by raising land levels, replanting mangroves and reconnecting services, residents reimagine and materially reshape their environment to sustain life under threat. In Scott's terms, these hidden transcripts express critique through everyday practices that subvert official narratives, turning displacement into persistence and vulnerability into agency (Scott, 1990). However, this mode of resistance is far from pacifist and people also employ tactics that are considered as illegal. This aligns with Peter Gelderloos’ (2016) critique of liberal frameworks that prioritize peaceful protest and legal channels, often inaccessible or ineffective for those living under systemic oppression. Instead, we show how residents of self-built neighbourhoods in Cartagena adopt a multiplicity of tactics outside the law. These actions embody a learned reality, that waiting for legal recognition or institutional support does not follow from using formal means of claiming rights, but instead from de-facto creating those rights and forcing the state to recognise them.

Quiet sabotage contests legality not through open confrontation, but through subtle, everyday acts that expose the limits and biases of the legal system. These are not random or criminal behaviours, as could be seen by an outsider, they are strategic responses to abandonment, displacement and exclusion. By quietly altering land to build homes, residents challenge the assumption that legality is the only path to inclusion. To call these acts sabotage is not to condemn them, but to expose how legality is constructed to serve elite interests. In the book Drug War Capitalism, Paley (2014) argues that categories of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are not neutral descriptors but tools of governance, used to justify militarization, land grabs and extractive expansion under the guise of public security. In our case, quiet sabotage allows marginalised communities to resist and to build contesting its legality.

Climate adaptation in Cartagena, as well as other cities around the world, illustrates also a form of green authoritarianism (Dunlap et al., 2024), where climate and environmental policies are increasingly used to justify militarized control and land dispossession. Under the current system, adaptation policies decide which communities are protected and which are rendered disposable, exposing a logic of climate violence through the lens of necropolitics (DeBoom, 2020). In this context, quiet sabotage and resistance emerge as a critical source of counter power for marginalised groups. However, we cannot romanticise resistance. In Cartagena, the use of waste materials for land reclamation exacerbates ecological degradation, and the uneven raising of land levels redistributes flood risks, often displacing vulnerability within the community itself.

We argue that resistance generates ‘legality from below’ in a context of plural legalities, with marginalized communities proactively shape land use laws and adaptation through lived practices. Law is not solely imposed from above; it is also created through persistent counter-legal practices. This argument builds on the rich tradition of legal pluralism, which has shown that state law is never singular or absolute but always exists in relation to other normative orders (de Sousa Santos, 2006; Griffiths, 1986; Merry, 1988). Santos and De (2020) argues that law is never singular but plural, produced through multiple, overlapping ‘interlegalities’ that emerge from below as well as from above. Esteva (2020) reminds us, these everyday acts of resistance are expressions of autonomy and creativity that challenge imposed development paradigms and open spaces for alternative forms of life and governance. In Cartagena, when residents construct homes without permits, fill in marshland to create space, or install informal water and electricity connections, they are not acting outside of law but creating counter-legalities that contest the state's monopoly over what counts as legal and legitimate.

If legality from below describes the broader phenomenon of communities co-producing alternative legal orders, then its operation in practice can be understood through a process of ‘quiet encroachment of the law’ to rephrase Bayat's (1997) quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Bayat emphasises how marginalised groups do not usually confront power through organised protest, but instead by persistently and quietly appropriating urban space and resources until their claims become undeniable. We advance Bayat's theory showing how in Cartagena, this quiet encroachment does not stop at the material level of land and infrastructure but extends into the legal system itself. Residents repeatedly build and rebuild homes, reconnect to services and return to land even after evictions. Over time, these persistent acts erode the legitimacy of state enforcement and compel legal recognition. A landmark Constitutional Court decision (SU-016 de 2021) reflected this dynamic by declaring that informal settlements are not simply illegal occupations, but also the product of the state's own failure to provide adequate housing and of its long-standing tolerance of the expansion of self-built neighbourhoods. Thus, residents cannot be simply expelled; instead, the state is legally obligated to offer alternative housing or compensation, a costly and politically difficult commitment. In this sense, quiet encroachment is not only spatial but juridical: it slowly converts illegal occupation into legally recognised rights, transforming the very boundaries of legality from below.

Legality from below unsettles the assumption of legal neutrality in climate governance and shows adaptation to be a contested terrain of power, rights and recognition. The resistance we document is not anti-law; it is a contestation over the law. Residents are not necessarily claiming complete autonomy from the state and independence, they want roads, schools and better health care. They quietly refuse disposability and create a space to exist claiming autonomy from state control, but also a dignified life. These forms of quiet resistance are constructive and destructive (Aalders and Müller-Mahn, 2025) reframing climate adaptation priorities. Following Esteva (2013), it is often among campesinos and urban marginalised groups that we find alternative paths to reimagine our world. It is in a pluriverse onto-epistemology that we can re-imagine legality from below. As we showed with the study of Cartagena's self-built neighbourhood, we can reimagine law-making rooted in autonomy and communal practices that seek to transform the legal system, so it responds to the needs and aspirations of society rather than imposed development paradigms.

Conclusion: Creating subaltern spaces of climate justice

In this article, we made two key arguments. First, quiet sabotage is not merely an illegal act of destruction but a material strategy through which marginalized communities reshape climate adaptation from below. Second, rather than representing lawlessness or non-compliance, sabotage reveals how these communities build legality from below, exposing the speculative nature of climate related laws, demonstrating how law is a battlefield, a place of domination but also contestation (Moyn, 2024). We argue that accepting legal pluralism, as a way to regulate society makes space for plural norms to co-exist. In this way, we extend Scott's notion of ‘weapons of the weak’ by showing that quiet resistance does not simply erode domination in the present; it can also produce long-term legal transformations, establish de facto rights and influence legal recognition from below. We also showed how quiet forms of resistance, such as ‘quiet sabotage’ can be more favourable to disadvantaged populations, avoiding costly practices such as litigation to confront adaptation by dispossession.

We argued that marginalized communities affected by climate change are not merely resisting from the margins, they are actively reshaping the terrain of urban governance and climate adaptation itself. Through quiet sabotage, they engage in subtle but deeply political acts that contest exclusionary state policies, disrupt narratives of ‘adaptation by dispossession’, and carve out new spaces of autonomy and dignity. These practices go beyond survival. They constitute a deliberate strategy to reconfigure power relations and assert rights from below, challenging dominant legal categories that label them as ‘illegal’ or ‘unadaptable’. Quiet sabotage, while central to our analysis, is only one among multiple strategies of community agency, existing alongside open protest, negotiation and collective organising, each contributing differently to how adaptation is contested and reimagined in a world where plural values, knowledge and rules exist.

Our analysis of adaptation by dispossession in Cartagena shows that climate adaptation is not only a field of technical solutions, such as those prioritised in global arenas including the Climate Conference of the Parties, but also of contestation, resistance and legal transformation. While elite actors mobilize discourses of risk and resilience to justify exclusion and developed nations re-direct what is left from foreign aid to technical solutions for adaptation, marginalized groups respond through quiet sabotage. They use everyday practices that disrupt, delay and reconfigure adaptation projects. These practices demonstrate that adaptation from below is not merely reactive or survivalist; it is constructive. By occupying space, redirecting resources and asserting their right to remain, residents create counter-legalities that force recognition and reshape the boundaries of law. In this sense, everyday resistance makes the law. It is through such practices that the struggles of the marginalized reconfigure adaptation, transforming it from a tool of dispossession into a contested terrain of justice and rights. Practices of quiet sabotage are not only legal or political claims but also ethical and life-affirming acts that express values and visions for the future, that cannot be fully captured by Western legal frameworks and often go far beyond them.

In a time when climate adaptation is increasingly used to justify displacement, it is urgent to recognize how law is not only a tool of control or oppression, but also a terrain of resistance. These everyday acts of survival and spatial claim-making demand a plural legal imagination that begins from below.