Between a rock and a hard place: exploring the lived experience of disability and climate injustice

This paper examines disability and climate injustice among rural livelihoods in Kenya and Uganda, foregrounding the importance of understanding, respecting and embedding the lived experiences of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in climate adaptation practice. Previous studies have highlighted the need to approach transformative adaptation through interventions that address the unjust knowledge and power relations that create vulnerability. Social injustice in essence describes the interlinked processes through which people come to be stuck between a rock and a hard place; a poignant way of characterizing the vulnerable situations that many PWDs have to navigate within everyday lives increasingly permeated by climate risk. Our study engages with everyday disability knowledges to explore how the disproportionate climate risks they experience intersect with processes of marginalization and a lack of access to the benefits of climate interventions. In both Kenya and Uganda, local adaptation decision-making structures involve explicit representation of PWDs. Despite this important progress, key dimensions through which exclusion and social injustices unfold are identified. The experiential knowledge of PWDs is essential to deepen our understanding of what it takes to build inclusive, mutual learning processes into transformative climate adaptation efforts, strengthening climate justice.