This paper analyses discourses and practices of flood response and adaptation to climate change in Mozambique. It suggests that the successes and failures of adaptation highly depend on the cultural and political realms of societal perceptions and the sensitivity of institutions. The paper adopted a multi-sited ethnographic approach to examine this, presenting five examples of research from different locations in Mozambique. The paper explores how adaptation to climate change becomes part of everyday politics, how actors aim to incorporate responses into the continuation of their normal behaviour and how elites are better positioned to take advantage of adaptation programmes than the vulnerable people that were targeted. It argues that climate change adaptation must be made compatible with past and present social and institutional processes.