Floods are not merely ‘natural’ disasters; rather, they emerge as socio-natural phenomena shaped by political, social, and economic processes. Law plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining these processes and contributes to the creation of unjust environments. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, this article analyzes the role of law and its interactions with colonialism and capitalism in the Damodar river valley in Eastern India. The Damodar river valley is an intensely engineered and hazardous region, a site of multiple interventions and developmental and ecological experiments for over a century. Colonial and post-colonial legacies have left a lasting imprint on legal, policy, and institutional frameworks, establishing a path-dependent trajectory for addressing future climate change adaptation challenges. While focusing on a specific case study, the article's approach and findings have broader significance, especially in the context of climate adaptation. The central argument underscores the need to understand the political and legal dimensions of flooding, and reinforces the need for a shift beyond incremental adjustments that do not tackle the underlying structures that produce the injustices associated with floods. It highlights the importance of ‘transformative adaptation’ approaches that address the root causes of climate-related disasters, such as restructuring power relations between actors, reconfiguring governance structures, and scrutinizing ideologies that mediate how water is used and distributed.

洪水不仅仅是“自然”灾害，也是“自然”灾害。相反，它们是作为政治、社会和经济进程塑造的社会自然现象而出现的。法律在产生和维持这些过程中发挥着关键作用，并有助于创造不公正的环境。本文借鉴政治生态学和环境史，分析了印度东部达莫达尔河流域法律的作用及其与殖民主义和资本主义的相互作用。达莫达尔河谷是一个经过精心设计的危险地区，一个多世纪以来，这里一直是多种干预措施以及发展和生态实验的场所。殖民和后殖民遗产在法律、政策和制度框架上留下了持久的印记，为应对未来气候变化适应挑战建立了一条路径依赖的轨迹。在关注具体案例研究的同时，本文的方法和研究结果具有更广泛的意义，特别是在气候适应的背景下。中心论点强调需要了解洪水的政治和法律层面，并强调需要超越渐进式调整，这种调整不能解决产生与洪水相关的不公正现象的根本结构。它强调了解决气候相关灾害根源的“变革性适应”方法的重要性，例如重组参与者之间的权力关系、重新配置治理结构以及审查调节水的使用和分配方式的意识形态。