Reimagining adaptation as everyday practices: agroecological misalignment, institutional thinness, and shifting socio-cultural norms in climate-vulnerable mountain agrarian peripheries of Nepal

Abstract

Climate change adaptation in Nepal’s agrarian highlands is realised primarily through everyday adaptation practices. Drawing on mixed-methods research in Bajhang District, Nepal, this paper integrates four decades of hydroclimatic trend analysis with qualitative data collected through fieldwork to examine how shifting monsoon timing, warming winters and declining snowfall disrupt crop calendars and destabilise subsistence farming. We show that hydroclimatic change is experienced less through changes in annual rainfall than through the erosion of seasonal reliability, compressing agricultural time and producing agroecological misalignment between inherited agrarian practices and emerging climatic conditions. Under these conditions, adaptation unfolds through temporally constrained responses shaped by institutional thinness and broader socioecological change. Fragmented and uneven irrigation access, limited mechanisation and the absence of locally actionable climate information constrain anticipatory planning. At the same time, male-selective migration, gendered labour norms and caste-based exclusions reconfigure agricultural labour and unevenly distribute adaptive burdens. Consequently, farmers respond through seasonal fallowing, crop switching, informal labour exchange, residue burning and seasonal migration. The paper demonstrates how lived experiences of agroecological misalignment, labour reordering and institutional thinness together shape everyday adaptation practices.

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