Fragile against What? Imagining Climate Change Resilience by Unmasking Governance Fragility
Publisher: Disasters
Author(s): Luissa Vahedi and Carmen Logie
Date: 2026
Topics: Climate Change, Governance
Since the 1990s, fragility has been used to describe low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with limited ability to respond to external threats in ways that ensure citizen safety, security, and welfare. Fragility challenges us to engage with governance, including why and how many institutions (including those in high-income countries) fail to protect citizens during climate change. The authors ask the question: how can state fragility be applied, critiqued, and expanded when considering climate change, including anthropogenic drivers, extreme weather events, mitigation, and adaptation? The authors present a globally applicable framework of governance fragility and emphasise the role of institutional-level gaps in motivation/willingness to act, evidence uptake, and implementation in creating fragilities that inhibit climate resilience. Using the United States as a case study, the authors apply the framework to identify the political ideologies that inform institutional-level motivations, shape evidence uptake, and moderate implementation capacity. This expanded notion of governance fragility (beyond conflict-affected LMICs) offers a globally-relevant lens to imagine possible solutions, including a research-to-practice agenda that contends both with ideology/willingness to act and decentralised forms of climate governance in the face of national-level fragilities.