The study arrives against a sobering backdrop. Zimbabwe has endured recurrent droughts, flooding and extreme heat over the past decade, with El Niño-induced drought exacerbating food insecurity and water scarcity and placing millions in need of humanitarian assistance. Roughly 60 percent of the population lives below the international poverty line, and nearly two-thirds of Zimbabweans live in rural areas facing persistent deficits in electricity, healthcare and digital connectivity. Persons with disabilities are estimated to make up between 7 and 11 percent of the national population, yet access to education, employment and healthcare remains significantly constrained. In this context, the study argues, climate change operates not as an isolated environmental phenomenon but as a multiplier of existing inequalities, disproportionately affecting people already marginalised by structural and historical processes.

What makes the research conceptually distinctive is its use of Social Representations Theory, a framework developed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici that explains how societies collectively make sense of complex phenomena through two interlocking processes. The first, anchoring, is the way unfamiliar ideas are interpreted through existing cultural categories; the second, objectification, is the way those abstract ideas harden into concrete institutional realities such as policies, infrastructure and everyday practices. Applied to disability in Zimbabwe, the theory reveals a damaging chain reaction. Disability is anchored to dominant narratives of dependency, incapacity and tragedy, legacies of colonial and biomedical models, and those narratives are then objectified in inaccessible buildings, exclusionary policies, communication systems designed for able-bodied users and the near-total absence of disabled people from decision-making forums.

The workshop’s early sessions documented that chain reaction in vivid detail. Participants described how climate and health policies function as spaces of absence, where disability is not merely overlooked but structurally excluded. A recurring theme was the lack of disability-disaggregated data, which participants understood as both a technical failure and a political statement. One participant captured the logic bluntly: if young people with disabilities are not counted, they are not planned for, and when disasters strike, officials express surprise that their needs were forgotten. Another recalled that during recent floods nobody came to check whether people with disabilities needed assistance because authorities had no records of where they lived. Invisibility in data, the participants concluded, translates directly into invisibility in emergency response.

Healthcare emerged as a second domain in which abstract assumptions about disability become materially dangerous. Participants described flooded roads that wheelchairs could not cross, clinics without staff trained to assist people with mobility impairments, and emergency rooms where disabled patients were told to wait while others were treated. One participant described how repeated delays during a flood crisis left her feeling that her life was less urgent than everyone else’s. Through the lens of Social Representations Theory, these encounters illustrate objectification in its most consequential form: institutional practices that reproduce exclusion precisely when survival depends on inclusion. Communication systems showed the same pattern, with early warnings for floods and heatwaves disseminated through radio announcements and formats that assume users can hear, see and read them, leaving disabled residents effectively behind before a disaster even begins.

Yet the most remarkable finding of the study is not the catalogue of barriers but the transformation that unfolded as the day progressed. During the participatory mapping exercises, participants began to reframe the absence of data as a site of agency rather than a verdict of irrelevance. Several groups proposed and initiated community-led mapping of young people with disabilities in their own neighbourhoods, identifying who lived where and what support they would need during emergencies. If the government will not collect the information, one participant reasoned, then communities should create it themselves so that officials can no longer claim ignorance. This single shift, from waiting to producing knowledge, illustrates what the researcher calls a change in objectification: policy ceases to be an external structure and becomes something that grassroots knowledge can reshape.

Similar reversals occurred across every domain the workshop touched. In healthcare, participants leveraged their daily experience of inaccessible services to propose concrete interventions, including mobile clinics, disability-sensitive triage systems and peer-led training for healthcare workers, arguing that people who live with these gaps know where communication breaks down and what support is actually needed. In communication, they began prototyping multi-modal approaches combining visual tools, audio technologies, sign language and community volunteers, insisting that accessibility should be built in from the start rather than added afterwards. In livelihoods, where droughts and floods repeatedly destroyed the informal incomes of people already assumed to be economically unproductive, participants described disability-led savings groups, repaired assistive devices, modified agricultural practices to reduce dependence on rainfall and peer networks for sharing climate information. Small initiatives, they acknowledged, but solutions nonetheless.

The participatory process also surfaced dimensions that mainstream adaptation research routinely misses. Young women with disabilities described heightened fears about personal safety and gender-based violence during climate-induced displacement, noting that inaccessible emergency shelters and sanitation facilities sometimes led them to avoid shelters altogether. Young men more often discussed barriers to employment and the strain of supporting family members despite disability-related obstacles. Across genders, participants framed adaptation not as an individual endeavour but as a collective responsibility rooted in relationships, a perspective that resonates strongly with the Southern African ethic of ubuntu, which emphasises interdependence and shared humanity. If one person is left behind, one participant argued, the whole community becomes weaker. Importantly, the study does not romanticise this relational ethic: participants also reported discrimination within their own families and communities, a reminder that cultural values require deliberate inclusion if they are to advance climate justice.

By the consensus-building sessions, the language of the room had shifted from what governments should do for disabled youth to what disabled youth could initiate themselves while demanding institutional support. Participants proposed youth councils, advocacy groups and direct engagement with local authorities, with one participant suggesting that if nobody invites them to the table, they should create their own table first and approach leaders as an organised, unified voice. The study’s author, Choolwe Mphanza Muzyamba of the University of Johannesburg, is careful to note the limits of this transformation: a single workshop cannot rewrite deeply embedded societal representations, and the findings document an emerging process of reconfiguration rather than a completed one. The theoretical contribution lies in showing that representations are not fixed cognitive schemas but negotiated realities that participatory processes can destabilise, particularly when the research deliberately incorporates decolonial and Afrocentric perspectives alongside Moscovici’s framework.

The implications extend well beyond Zimbabwe. The study challenges what climate justice scholars call the vulnerability paradigm, in which marginalised populations appear in research and policy primarily as passive victims, obscuring their agency and adaptive capacity. It argues instead for inclusion as transformation rather than inclusion as representation: disabled young people recognised as producers of knowledge, not merely beneficiaries of it. On the policy side, the recommendations are concrete, from integrating community-led disability mapping into district disaster preparedness plans to institutionalising meaningful participation of young people with disabilities in climate governance. The study also acknowledges its own constraints, including its urban setting, single-workshop design and the researcher’s final role in manuscript preparation, and calls for longitudinal and comparative participatory research to test whether these emerging representations can be sustained and scaled. What the Harare workshop demonstrates, however, is already significant: that the populations most often treated as climate change’s most helpless casualties may also be among its most perceptive analysts, and that equitable adaptation may depend less on new technology than on finally listening to the people who have been navigating exclusion all their lives.

Subject of Research: Participatory climate adaptation research with young people with disabilities in Zimbabwe

Article Title: Advancing inclusive climate adaptation through participatory action research with young people with disabilities in Zimbabwe

Article References: Muzyamba, C. M. (2026). Advancing inclusive climate adaptation through participatory action research with young people with disabilities in Zimbabwe. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 255. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00537-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00537-w

Keywords: climate adaptation, disability inclusion, Zimbabwe, participatory action research, social representations theory, climate justice, youth, Harare, community-led mapping, inclusive communication, adaptive livelihoods, decolonial methodology