When Climate Policy Meets Prolonged Scarcity: Governance as Infrastructure for Endurance

Climate adaptation policy continues to underperform in the face of prolonged scarcity when frameworks are oriented toward recovery rather than endurance. Stephanie Zabriskie argues that Indigenous systems of governance offer operational lessons for designing institutions around access rather than output when scarcity is sustained rather than temporary.

Most climate adaptation frameworks are built to respond to crisis events, restore baseline conditions, and measure success against pre-crisis norms. Yet in many regions facing climate stress, particularly arid and semi-arid zones, scarcity is no longer episodic. When policy is designed around recovery rather than endurance, its metrics, incentives, and institutions can fail precisely when they are most needed.

Current adaptation and resilience frameworks often prioritise shock response and recovery-based implementation, even where official definitions emphasise long-term adaptation and capacity-building. In practice, implementation of adaptation responses under the UNFCCC and multilateral development programmes frequently relies on metrics and funding logics that privilege restoration of baseline function as the measure of success. Under conditions of prolonged environmental stress, this operational emphasis becomes a liability. Policy systems designed to restore normality struggle to function when scarcity is no longer temporary but structurally persistent.

Across large parts of East Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, the IPCC (AR6) documents how long-duration climate stress is redefining livelihood systems, mobility patterns, and institutional capacity. Water access, food security, education continuity, and social stability can no longer be treated as separate policy domains; they operate as interdependent systems under sustained constraint. Decisions in one area now directly shape outcomes in the others; siloed interventions frequently exacerbate fragility in another.

The central policy challenge is not how quickly communities recover after a shock, but whether governance structures can continue to coordinate access, maintain peace, and sustain legitimacy when scarcity persists over time. Addressing this blind spot requires applying policy frameworks in ways that prioritise endurance rather than recovery, and that are capable of governing under sustained scarcity.

The Limits of Recovery-Based Policy

Climate adaptation strategies are commonly evaluated through output and usage metrics such as utilisation rates, behavioural uptake, or service continuity. These measures are subsequently treated as indicators of success and used to determine whether initiatives should continue or receive support.

In current policy practice, these metrics are often elevated to outcome measures rather than treated as operational inputs. This framing misclassifies management data as determinants of policy legitimacy. Output and usage metrics function best as programme management tools: they provide operational data to assess delivery performance, identify gaps, and adjust implementation strategies over time. When used to adjudicate policy success, however, they obscure the more fundamental question of whether access to essential resources has been secured.

At the level of climate adaptation policy evaluation, access itself should be recognised as the legitimate outcome. This does not eliminate accountability, but shifts it away from proving continuous individual usage and toward assessing the governance capacity required to sustain access over time.

When access to water, food, or mobility is made contingent on continuous usage verification, communities under stress are placed in a persistent cycle of justification. In such contexts, policy legitimacy becomes anchored in performance reporting rather than in the durability of access itself. Under prolonged drought, households may temporarily reduce consumption, migrate seasonally, or reallocate labour away from formal systems. Declining usage in these contexts is not a signal of failure but an adaptive response to sustained constraint.

Recovery-oriented metrics frequently misinterpret these shifts as underperformance, triggering funding pauses or service withdrawal that further destabilise already constrained systems. Reliability of access is better assessed at the programme level through governance continuity, such as decision authority, coordination capacity, and mechanisms for maintaining social balance, as articulated in the OECD Principles on Water Governance.

Indigenous Systems of Governance under Sustained Scarcity

If access is the primary outcome, the critical question shifts to governance: which institutional arrangements reliably sustain access under persistent scarcity. Indigenous governance systems developed in arid and semi-arid environments offer a particularly instructive logic.

Among pastoralist communities in East Africa, Maasai communal water governance via elders’ councils (IIED) illustrates how access is coordinated under prolonged constraint. Water use is managed through layered authority structures that regulate seasonal access, assign maintenance responsibilities, and adapt norms during periods of drought. Wells function not as open-access assets, but as governed sites where stewardship, legitimacy, and survival imperatives are aligned to sustain availability over time.

Crucially, access itself is treated as the outcome. Once access is secured, governance systems focus on stewardship, management, and adaptation rather than individual behaviour and measurements for external validation. Data is used internally to manage risk, not externally to justify legitimacy.

The relevance of these systems lies in how authority and coordination are organised under constraint. Their core features include distributed decision making, flexible access rules, and practices that maintain social balance. These features can be adapted across settings, even as their specific forms differ by context.

Access as Infrastructure, not Output

If sustaining access depends on governance rather than outputs, then the primary infrastructure at stake is institutional rather than physical. Global policy frameworks often treat infrastructure as assets—wells, pipelines, treatment facilities—while positioning governance as secondary. Indigenous systems invert this hierarchy: governance functions as infrastructure.

Physical assets are effective only insofar as they are embedded within legitimate, adaptive decision-making structures capable of coordinating access and maintaining social cohesion. When drought persists for years rather than months, the durability of governance determines whether infrastructure functions at all. Wells without governance become contested sites. Food aid without distribution authority destabilises local markets. Education systems without mobility accommodation collapse when households must adapt livelihoods to environmental stress.

Designing policy for access rather than usage requires recognising governance as a core foundational investment. This includes decision-making authority, coordination mechanisms, and leadership structures that retain legitimacy over time. Without these, physical investments can degrade rapidly under sustained pressure.

Implications for Global Policy Design

Three implications for global policy design follow.

1. Outcome metrics must distinguish between access and utilisation. Access to essential services should be recognised as a primary indicator of policy success, regardless of short-term usage fluctuations.
2. Policy design must prioritise governance continuity over project scalability. Interventions that bypass local authority structures may deliver rapid outputs but weaken institutional durability and long-term stability (ODI).
3. Indigenous systems of governance should be engaged as operational models. Authority should be integrated into policy parameters rather than consulted symbolically.

Rethinking Resilience

While resilience encompasses adaptation and persistence in theory, policy frameworks frequently translate it into recovery-oriented programming focused on restoring baseline conditions. Indigenous systems demonstrate an alternative: resilience as the capacity to maintain legitimacy, coordination, and access when conditions do not improve.

As climate stress intensifies globally, institutions designed for recovery will increasingly struggle. The challenge ahead is not only technical but conceptual. It requires redefining success away from optimisation and growth toward endurance and access.

Stephanie Zabriskie is a global development strategist and systems leader who oversees large-scale international development projects and government partnerships, specializing in international finance, public–private partnerships (P3), and social impact grounded in Indigenous systems and leadership, and she is the Founder and Executive Director of Humanculture, an Indigenous-led organization advancing decolonial humanitarian initiatives focused on water access, food security, and women’s economic autonomy in low-infrastructure environments. Recognized in Forbes 40 Under 40, her work informs international policy discussions related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and contributes to global academic discourse through lectures at Columbia and Fordham Universities and research published in the Journal of Nonprofit Innovation.

Photo by Sachin  Saini