Counteradaptation in Vulnerable Socio-ecological Systems in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change yet least resourced toconfront its impacts. Mainstream climate governance often casts adaptation as a technicaladjustment to biophysical hazards, but such framings risk naturalizing inequality by obscuringthe longue-durée histories of extraction and dispossession that have structured vulnerability.Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in coastal, agrarian, and urban communities inSierra Leone, this paper introduces the concept of counteradaptation to illustrate how peoplenavigate not only environmental volatility but also the antagonistic pressures generated by(neo)colonial systems. Counteradaptation highlights how adaptive moves in one domain—whether foreign extraction, ‘development’ apparatuses, or climate policy regimes—create newpressures that compel situated responses elsewhere. Case studies of fishing communities, timberand gold frontiers, and informal urban settlements show how counteradaptation reframeshabitability as a contested threshold and exposes the limits of technocratic adaptation toolkits. Bysituating climate response within histories of coloniality and predatory accumulation,counteradaptation offers a novel analytic for understanding ‘environmental’ behavior.