More-than-climate politics in rurality: Normative pathways for living with loss and vanishing continuity in place

Abstract

This study examines how values- and place-based adaptation pathway planning offers a relational and experimental counter-process to state-driven climate risk assessments and resilience imperatives. By employing an innovative, iterative, and participatory methodology in a regional tree-changer town in Western Australia, we investigate social and environmental dilemmas of precarity, continuity, and hope and illustrate how residents engage in difficult trade-offs to decide what to save and what to let go against the backdrop of increasing fires, drought, and heat. We find that the affective dimensions of lived values are under distress and that a more-than-climate politics is a compelling scholarly lens for examining diverging temporalities of loss in rural settings where some cherished aspects of lives and lifestyles will not be salvageable. Climatic hazards, alongside changing demographics, strains to community cohesion, and governmental neglect, narrow desirable pathways for restorative futures. We conclude by advocating for relational knowledge and stewardship approaches in rural adaptation and embodied resilience-in-the-making that counteract current modes of climate governmentality. Such relationality validates place-based values and more-than-human harm while also remedying ongoing injustices through careful, deliberative experiments to prefigure normative community trajectories.