Adaptation to climate change is increasingly advocated as we approach a 1.5 °C future. Policy-makers emphasise that the required transformation begins with local action. Yet, there is a gap in understanding why local action can remain largely locked-in to maladaptive cycles, with variable on-ground evidence of transformative change. Using ‘the politics of scale,’ we interrogated ‘the local’ using ethnographic interviews. We found that although local actors are engaged in various ways, ‘doing’ environmental work at a very local scale, their practices are constrained, reinforced by cultural, political, and economic arguments. We conceptualise ‘hyper-localism’ and ‘temporal passivity’ as emergent conditions that mask connectivity to wider social and ecological networks leading to transformative possibilities. We argue that global climate change discourses reinforce these internal conditions by failing to acknowledge the complexity associated with the ‘politics of scale’. The local scale of change is not necessarily more manageable, or its actions likely to create a shared vision. Adaptation is reduced to performative tasks rather than connected processes, impacting the scope and effectiveness of change on-ground. Further, in this Australian case study, we see how local ‘doing’ is still subject to the cross-scale impacts of diminishing nation-state government resourcing reflecting the far-reaching consequences of small-government austerity models, and the foisting of responsibility for adaptation to the least powerful and least resourced sectors of civic society. We conclude with the idea that if local adaptation is to lead to transformative outcomes that connect to a global transcendence to affect climate direction, systems of governance need to be linked to strategic visions that deliberately engage with the ‘politics of scale’, and to affirm more complex processes in engaging with the fluidity of a purposeful global-local nexus.

随着我们接近1.5°C的未来，人们越来越提倡适应气候变化。政策制定者强调，所需的转型始于地方行动。但是，在理解局部行动为何仍能在很大程度上适应不良适应循环，并具有变化性的实地证据的变化方面，仍存在差距。利用“规模政治”，我们通过人种学访谈来询问“当地人”。我们发现，尽管地方行为者以各种方式参与其中，却在非常局部的规模上“从事”环境工作，但他们的行为受到文化，政治和经济论点的制约和加强。我们将“超本地化”和“时间被动性”概念化为新兴条件，这些条件掩盖了与更广泛的社会和生态网络的连通性，从而带来了变革的可能性。我们认为，全球气候变化话语未能承认与“规模政治”相关的复杂性，从而加剧了这些内部条件。局部变化的规模不一定更易于管理，或者其行为可能会产生共同的愿景。适应减少到执行任务，而不是连接的过程，从而影响了现场变更的范围和有效性。此外，在这个澳大利亚的案例研究中，我们看到了本地“行事”仍然如何受到民族国家政府资源减少的跨规模影响的影响，反映了小政府紧缩模型的深远影响以及对政府责任的强化适应公民社会中实力最弱，资源最匮乏的部门。