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An emerging component of the adaptation discourse, embracing theory, practice and review, is that of the negative assessment of adaptation, namely, maladaptation. Political theories and concepts have been applied as one of these assessment tools, giving rise to a political critique of maladaptation. Such a critique contrasts with the more conventional scientific and technical assessments of adaptation policies, programs and practices. Key political themes in studies of maladaptation include resource management and allocations, decision making processes, equity and fairness, gender, power and influence, and Nature and ecology. Within the scholarship on the politics of maladaptation, overlapping frameworks can be identified. Critiques of adaptation have been applied to the preconditions of adaptation, adaptation decision making processes and institutions, and to adaptation outcomes. There are a number of conceptual challenges in undertaking political analyses of adaptation. In this article, we outline the origins of the adaptation and maladaptation concepts, we describe the key political issues, we identify the application of politics in the maladaptation discourse and identify the major political perspectives. Finally, we draw conclusions on the state of the maladaptation discourse.

Weather risk is an issue of extraordinary concern in the face of climate change, not least for rural agricultural households in developing countries. Governments and international donors currently promote 'climate insurance', financial mechanisms that make payouts following extreme weather events. Technologically innovative insurance programmes are heralded as promising strategies for decreasing poverty and improving resilience in countries that are heavily dependent on smallholder agriculture. New subsidies will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, yet funders and advocates have thus far neglected the social and ecological ramifications of these policies. Reviews have focused largely on near-term economic effects and practical challenges. This briefing draws on an initial inventory of potential adverse effects of insurance programmes on local agricultural systems that we have recently assembled. Our review shows that farmers with insurance may alter their land-use strategies or their involvement in social networks previously used to mitigate climate risk. Both processes constitute crucial feedbacks on the environmental and the social systems respectively. Based on our study, we suggest preliminary principles for avoiding maladaptive outcomes, including recommenda­tions for designing appropriate impact studies and in­surance programmes. Before implementation, pilot projects should assess existing local risk-management strategies, financial instruments, and extant state agricultural and social protection policies. Participatory processes should be designed to anticipate and appraise potential effects of insurance – including those resulting from changing land use – and interactions with existing public policies. Several recommendations for improvements to the elabora­tion and design of future agricultural insurance programmes follow from our analysis: 1. Evaluate priorities 2. Encourage diversity 3. Adapt policies 4. Choose the right scale 5. Limit coverage to extremes 6. Tie insurance to ecologically sound strategies Current and future 'climate insurance' projects should be combined with consciously designed programmes to invest in and foster farmer-led learning on sustainable agricultural techniques. Policies linking insurance coverage and subsidies to diversified and ecologically sensitive cultivation may provide new frameworks for the design of insurance programmes in developing countries. This also requires rethinking the accepted wisdom on bundling insurance with inputs, which may make social-ecological systems and smallholders more fragile and vulnerable in the face of a changing climate.

This paper examines the determinants of climate related disasters and attempts to estimate the presence of adaptive capacity in terms of per capita income and population density elasticities. We find evidence of adaptive capacity in a "weak" form both in terms of income and population density elasticities over our entire sample. That is, damages are in fact increasing with income and population, but less than proportionally. There is also evidence of countries improving their adaptive capacity over the long run, but of maladaptation occurring in the short run. Repeating the analysis splitting the sample by per-capita income levels, we find that higher income countries show adaptive capacity in a "strong form", i.e. damages decrease with GDP, while lower income countries highlight exactly the opposite behavior. Finally, using Granger causality tests for panel data, we find evidence of increase in GDP per capita Granger causing climate related damages for lower income countries, but not in higher income countries.