Adaptation Without Agency Is Not Resilience

CHANDRALIM PHUKAN

When a milk chilling centre in rural India no longer depends on diesel and gets solarised, that is adaptation. But when the women around it gain more reliable incomes, lower operating costs, cleaner air, and the chance to run local energy enterprises, that becomes something bigger. That is not just surviving climate stress. That is acquiring agency.

And agency is the word missing from too much of today’s climate-resilience debate.

Across the world, adaptation is still measured through a familiar checklist: hectares restored, embankments built, early warning systems installed, beneficiaries reached, physical assets protected. Those things matter. But they also reveal a troubling blind spot. They tell us whether a project touched a place, not whether it changed who gets to decide, earn, own, save time, or absorb shocks and overcome them. Even the institutions shaping global adaptation metrics now acknowledge the problem: beneficiary counts are measures of breadth, not depth. They do not tell us how much people actually benefit.

That blind spot is expensive in India, where climate vulnerability is colliding with unequal labour and care systems. The latest official labour data show a female labour force participation rate of 40% for those aged 15 and above, compared with 79.1% for men. The 2024 Time Use Survey shows that women aged 15–59 who perform unpaid domestic services still spend 305 minutes a day on them; 41% also participate in caregiving, spending 140 minutes a day compared with 74 minutes for men. In other words, the Indian woman most praised in adaptation rhetoric is often still the one carrying unpaid labour that adaptation metrics miss to count.

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This is where adaptation policy often mistakes endurance for resilience. If a programme preserves a water asset but not a woman’s time, if it protects a village road but not the continuity of her enterprise, if it reaches her as a “beneficiary” but not as a decision-maker, it may reduce exposure without changing vulnerability. That is adaptation without agency.
The global finance story shows why this keeps happening.

OECD data show that adaptation finance reached USD 34.7 billion in 2024, but energy accounted for only 3% of adaptation finance across 2016–2024. Water took 18%, agriculture 17%, and a large catch-all “other sectors” bucket took 46%. The message is unmistakable: adaptation systems recognize water, agriculture, and infrastructure. They do not yet fully recognize productive energy as adaptation. That is a serious mistake for countries like India, where reliable electricity often determines whether livelihoods survive climate stress at all.

 Bihar’s JEEViKA ecosystem has built hundreds of solar marts run by women energy entrepreneurs. In Gujarat, programmes with SEWA have helped women salt-pan workers move from diesel dependence toward solar pumps and solar technician roles, with reported savings and income gains that materially change their bargaining position. In Odisha, solar driers linked to women’s self-help groups are improving the processing and marketability of fish and farm products. These are not side stories to adaptation. They are what adaptation looks like when it enters the economy of everyday life.

The draft Climate Finance Taxonomy says adaptation spending needs could reach ₹56.68 trillion by 2030 under a business-as-usual scenario. India has also said its adaptation-relevant public expenditure reached 5.6% of GDP in 2021–22, up from 3.7% in 2015–16. Yet our state adaptation plans still operationalize gender unevenly, often recognizing women as vulnerable without building indicators around ownership, control, time, care, and enterprise continuity.

That must change. India should begin by requiring that every publicly funded adaptation programme report not only assets protected but also who controls the productive asset, who controls the income it generates, and how much unpaid labour it reduces. We need a Productive Energy Index that tracks reliable electricity for income-generating activity, operating hours preserved during climate shocks, diesel costs avoided, and enterprise survival after extreme weather.

We need adaptive-agency metrics that measure women’s control over assets, earnings, credit access, formal registration, and participation in local adaptation decisions. We need corporate social responsibility funding to move away from symbolic solar installations and toward women-led productive resilience.

The point is simple. A woman who receives a machine but not financing, not ownership, not repair support, and not time relief is not resilient. A village with a climate-proofed asset but no local capacity to govern, maintain, and profit from it is not resilient either. Resilience is not the presence of infrastructure alone. It is the presence of agency.
India does not need fewer adaptation projects. It needs better definitions of what adaptation looks like. Until agency enters the metric, resilience will remain something measured around poor women rather than built with them.

Chandralim Phukan is a Research Associate at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi. Operating out of TERI’s Centre for Rural Action and Social Transformation, she played an integral role in organizing the 25th Edition of TERI’s World Sustainable Development Summit in 2026

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