Discussions of climate change and water security in Africa are often simplistic and indeed deterministic. They overlook not only ecological complexities but also the multitude of ways in which various population groups across the continent approach climatological variability, thereby challenging positivist modeling and external adaptation agendas. The current state of affairs for many often-silenced citizens is already one of hunger, uncertainty, and marginalization; the self-appointed lead actors on climate adaptation–states, markets, NGOs–have, from their vantage point, deeply troubling track records of dealing with people and their environments. For plenty of communities around Africa, it might therefore not so much be only the worsening climate that is increasingly exposing people to disease, displacement, and water insecurity, but the very policies adopted in the name of preparing for, and living with, worsening weather. This essay explores how understanding climate adaptation as a fundamentally social and political process points to possibilities for imagining and working toward futures with greater emancipatory potential. There is no scenario in which African societies adapt successfully to climatic change and do not simultaneously radically reimagine both their relationship with the outside world and with each other, including institutions of control and mechanisms of exclusion at home.

Global environmental imaginaries such as “the climate crisis” and “water wars” dominate the discussion on African states and their predicament in the face of global warming and unmet demands for sustainable livelihoods. I argue that the intersecting challenges of water, energy, and food insecurity are providing impetus for the articulation of ambitious state-building projects, in the Nile Basin as elsewhere, that rework regional political geographies and expand “infrastructural power”–the ways in which the state can penetrate society, control its territory, and implement consequential policies. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam should be understood as intending to alter how the state operates, domestically and internationally; how it is seen by its citizens; and how they relate to each other and to their regional neighbors. To legitimize such material and ideational transformations and reposition itself in international politics, the Ethiopian party-state has embedded the dam in a discourse of “environmental justice”: a rectification of historical and geographical ills to which Ethiopia and its impoverished masses were subjected. However, critics have adopted their own environmental justice narratives to denounce the failure of Ethiopia's developmental model and its benefiting of specific ethnolinguistic constituencies at the expense of the broader population.