Reinforcing Vulnerability: Urban Adaptation

This research paper evaluates a two-year knowledge co-production process focused on urban heat vulnerability in Malmö, Sweden. It argues that collaborative adaptation processes can inadvertently reinforce vulnerability and reproduce power imbalances through epistemic injustice, identifying seven specific unintended consequences and providing four recommendations for future practice.

• A two-year knowledge co-production process in Malmö, Sweden, aimed at exploring urban heat vulnerability, revealed that collaborative efforts can reproduce power imbalances and sideline certain perspectives, illustrating the concept of epistemic injustice where specific forms of knowledge are privileged over others.
• The evaluation of the Malmö case study identified seven unintended consequences related to epistemic injustice: power imbalances, token participation, credibility excesses, intra-neighborhood inequalities, prejudicial stereotypes, the reinforcement of territorial stigmatization, and a general lack of evaluation regarding failures and tensions in co-production.
• The authors propose four recommendations to improve future knowledge co-production in urban adaptation: treating the process as a political and moral undertaking instead of a technical exercise, reframing vulnerability as relational and structural rather than individual, embracing transparency regarding trade-offs and tensions, and integrating learning, evaluation, and monitoring.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2025). Reinforcing Vulnerability: Urban Adaptation. https://www.sei.org/publications/reinforcing-vulnerability-urban-adaptation/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Reinforcing Vulnerability: Urban Adaptation. 2025. https://www.sei.org/publications/reinforcing-vulnerability-urban-adaptation/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Reinforcing Vulnerability: Urban Adaptation |date=5 December 2025 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/reinforcing-vulnerability-urban-adaptation/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2025reinforcing, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Reinforcing Vulnerability: Urban Adaptation}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2025}, month = dec, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/reinforcing-vulnerability-urban-adaptation/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }