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This article describes social encounters produced by climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a concept increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of relocation from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation, I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement was transformed by government investment. I describe how Louisiana's Office of Community Development relied on Tribal planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to reduce the scope of the resettlement, and systematically erased the initial resettlement rationales and aims of Indigenous leaders. I liken the state's approach to Dina Gilio-Whitaker's notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy, and argue that state efforts to transform the resettlement from what Tribal leaders viewed as "an act of cultural survival" to a scalable model for managed retreat policy threatens to reproduce a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist futures are once again rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples. State tools for decontextualization included published constructions of risk, community, and timelines; liberal planning conventions; and evocations of legal barriers. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.

This open access book explores the intersection of property law, relocation, and resettlement processes in the United States and among communities that grapple with migration as an adaptation strategy. As communities face the prospect of relocating because of rising seas, policy makers, disaster specialists, and community leaders are scrambling to understand what adaptation pathways are legally possible. While in its ideal application, law functions blindly and without variation, the authors find that legal contradictions come to bear on resettlement processes and place certain communities further in harm's way. This book will unearth these contradictions in order to understand why successful community-based resettlement has presented such a challenge to communities that are experiencing increasing land deterioration as a result of climate change.

Part I: Conceptualizing Property and Its Contradictions: A Challenge for Climate Justice -- Chapter 1: Pulling at the Thread -- Chapter 2: Property Law and Its Contradictions -- Part II: Proof of Harm -- Chapter 3: Market Orientation as an Environmental Hazard for Resettling Communities -- Chapter 4: Flood Buyout Relocations and Community Action -- Chapter 5: Displacing a Right to Act Communally within Community Relocation -- Chapter 6: Precarious Possessors and "the Right to (rebuilding) the City" -- Chapter 7: Interrogating "Just Compensation" and Flexibility: Details on the Inadequacy (and Importance) of Voluntary Buyouts for Relocation in Alaska -- Part III: The Legal Framework -- Chapter 8: A Primer of Laws, Legal Concepts, and Tools that Structure Relocation -- Chapter 9: Discretion and the Roles People Play in Interpreting and Applying the Law -- Chapter 10: Concluding Thoughts.