The Quiet Encroachment of Law: Legal Pluralism and Everyday Resistance in Climate Adaptation
Climate breakfast seminar with Ana Maria Vargas Falla, Lund University.
This presentation brings together three articles I recently published – on quiet resistance, the “law of the four poles,” and climate adaptation by dispossession – to examine how law is lived, negotiated, and subtly transformed in everyday contexts of climate change. Rather than approaching law as a stable framework governing adaptation, I explore what might be called the quiet encroachment of the law: how ordinary actors engage, reinterpret, and at times subvert legal and regulatory structures through everyday practices of survival. These practices, ranging from what I conceptualise as “quiet resistance” to forms of “quiet sabotage”, do not openly confront legal authority, yet they reshape how climate governance operates on the ground. Building on insights from legal pluralism, the presentation argues that climate adaptation unfolds within a multiplicity of normative orders, where formal law intersects with informal, lived, and often invisible practices. The “law of the four poles” is introduced to understand how authority, legitimacy, necessity, and resistance interact in these contexts, particularly under conditions of dispossession. By foregrounding the power of the ordinary, the paper challenges dominant legal narratives around compliance, enforcement, and institutional design. Instead, it highlights how adaptation is co-produced through everyday engagements with law, where marginalised actors are not merely subjects of regulation but active participants in the ongoing making and unmaking of legal order. In doing so, the presentation invites a rethinking of climate law beyond formal frameworks, toward a more grounded understanding of how law operates in practice and how it is quietly transformed from below.
About the speaker
Ana Maria Vargas Falla is a Colombian lawyer and sociologist of law studying quiet forms of resistance to the law. From indigenous communities to informal settlements, she listens to how people reimagine law in their everyday lives. Her work challenges dominant narratives and uplifts voices from the margins, showing how climate and legal futures are being shaped from below. Her academic background includes a PhD in sociology of law from Lund University and the University of Milan. Her thesis was awarded the prize for Best Dissertation in Sweden in the field of working environment by the Forum for Working Life Research in 2016. Her research was highlighted as one of the 10 Insights in Climate Science in 2024-2025 for her contribution to understanding popular resistance and opposition to climate policies. She has written several articles about the role of law in climate adaptation.