In climate adaptation plans, national sustainability strategies, and agency-level resilience frameworks, planetary limits are routinely acknowledged, yet proposed responses continue to center on expansion, replication, and scalability. This paper argues that this tension is not merely political or technical but grammatical. It reflects the dominance of the grammar of scale—a patterned way of organizing, evaluating, and legitimizing sustainability action through expansion, metrics, piloting, and exit. While indispensable in many contexts, scale increasingly struggles to secure durable ecological responsibility amid irreversibility, uneven exposure, and intergenerational harm. The paper advances a framework of plural sustainability grammars to diagnose this mismatch. In addition to scale, it identifies six alternative grammars—attachment, settlement, sufficiency, inheritance, exposure, and refusal—that already circulate, often implicitly, within sustainability discourse. Each grammar foregrounds dimensions of responsibility that scalability tends to background, including permanence, restraint, cumulative consequence, and ethical limits. The paper traces these grammars through climate adaptation planning frameworks across governance levels, showing how plural grammars are prominent in problem framing and diagnosis but are progressively narrowed as plans move toward implementation, monitoring, and accountability, where scale becomes dominant. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this grammatical narrowing for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars concerned with adaptation, justice, and the governance of sustainability under planetary limits.
Michael Carolan (2026) studied this question.