Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the uneven and discriminatory discursive facets of urban flood resilience - the mainstream policy framework addressing urban flooding - across Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, making theoretical and empirical contributions to racial capitalism and GPEE debates.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the discursive facets of urban flood resilience, a mainstream global policy framework targeting urban flooding, across socially established and maintained divides across the global North and South. It does so by interrogating the uneven and discriminatory nature of urban flood resilience across my two case studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thus far, debates on resilience in international political economy understand resilience as a policy framework that largely reformulates and mediates neoliberal governance through austerity measures, technocratic policies, and subject discipline. Despite the value of these studies, they overlook the powerful discursive narratives guiding the rollout of resilience across the global North and South that is deeply informed by historical legacies of colonialism and self-help development policies, which I argue depoliticize the causes and consequences of class-based, gendered and racial inequalities across and within societies. I further argue that a deeply hierarchical global political and economic system reliant upon racialized labour continues to rationalize global environmental inequality in favour of patch-work capitalist solutions. I will investigate the following discursive dimensions of urban flood resilience: 1) how resilience is presented as self-evidently positive, yet is simultaneously historically embedded within global dynamics of uneven development, 2) what levels of environmental inequality are justified and for whom across Dhaka and Amsterdam, and, 3) the manner in which resilience is a novel form of self-help development policies and the manner in which they support neoliberal solutions to systemic class, gendered, racial and environmental inequality.

Paper short abstract:

This piece details how Indigenous land defenders are protecting the environment and their ways of being from development aggression, state-sponsored land grabs, and neoextractivism. It is informed by critical theories of race and decolonisation and three decades of combined engaged movement praxis.

Paper long abstract:

The repudiation of Indigenous people’s land rights, governance systems, and worldviews––not to mention contributions to knowledge production and ways of living sustainably amidst the crisis of dangerous climate change and overconsumption––remain some of the world’s most pressing issues of exclusion and injustice to this day. Accordingly, this article offers an anti-colonial analysis of the Maya land struggle in Toledo District, Belize. We contend that state-sponsored violations of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, which continue to occur under a pretence of “development” and “green recovery,” reveal the persistent coloniality and deep-seated racial animus of the Westminster-modelled postcolonial state. Drawing from movement-engaged evidence and revolutionary theories of race, violence, and decolonisation, we explain how the liberal-capitalist state and third-party corporate extractors it authorises are aiding and abetting dispossession, environmental degradation, heritage-site destruction, disavowals of self-determination, and the criminalisation of land defenders. We do so through an overview of (neo)extractivism and a historical-structural summary of how the driving forces of capital accumulation affect Maya communities. The piece ultimately shows how state-sanctioned FPIC violations, premeditated abdications of the duty to consult, and bad faith negotiations with Indigenous people constitute contemporary manifestations of colonial power, racial-capitalist exploitation, and slow violence. Conceptually, the article demonstrates how land-grabbing, processes of negative racialisation, and coloniality are inextricably linked. Geopolitically, we are detailing how historically-repressed communities who were the targets of imperialism are exercising political agency; co-constructing autonomy; and building resurgent, sustainable alternatives in an agrarian Majority World context that is situated in both Central America and the Caribbean.

Paper short abstract:

The current financing of renewable energies in Africa follows neo-colonial patterns. This contribution aims to understand these financing patterns at the disciplinary juncture of critical finance, political economy and postcolonial studies.

Paper long abstract:

Financing for renewable energy technologies in Africa currently faces a challenging situation. On the one hand financing is needed for universal energy access, on the other hand the current instruments of climate finance are locked in a hierarchical, inequitable and neo-colonial financial system. Although ‘new’ green financial instruments are presented, underlying financial patterns trace colonial relations. These financing patterns shape local and transnational energy transformations.

The scholarship on financial subordination, stemming from critical finance and international political economy serves as a starting point to unpack the unequal and Global North dominated financial relations rooted in colonialism. While the scholarship on financial subordination makes references to colonialism, it does not take it as the key analytical vantage point. This contribution aims for a recognition of the significance of colonial relations for contemporary climate finance. It therefore suggests a joint conversation between postcolonial studies and literature from financial subordination and ask what a postcolonial perspective does contribute to the field. Based on this interdisciplinary conversation, the article pursues to-centre and re-orient perspectives towards colonial legacies both in knowledge production and financial relations. This shift in perspective leads to a questioning of the analytical standpoint itself and to widen our understanding of financial subordination towards the coloniality in “micro-financial-practices” and the everyday level of financial subordination. This, I argue, serves to understand the unfolding of racial capitalism within renewable energy financing and to de-layer colonial entanglements within contemporary finance for renewable energies in Africa.