Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Lily Salloum Lindegaard
(Danish Institute for International Studies)
Neil Webster (Danish Institute for International Studies)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Governance
- Sessions:
- Monday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to nuance narratives of climate mobility. It examines how governance and policy interventions, from formal and informal governance actors across scales, influence how climate change is experienced and how households and individuals formulate and practice (im)mobility as a response.
Long Abstract:
Climate-related mobility is receiving extensive attention as the impacts of anthropogenic climate change intensify. Scholarly and policy debates on the topic are, however, often influenced by narratives of a direct, causal relationship between climate and mobility, where climate change drives mobility responses. However, this simplistic framing is questioned by research that examines the role of governance factors in shaping climate change impacts and mobility decisions and practices, including immobility.
This panel seeks to generate further engagement on the role of governance in climate-related (im)mobility. Specifically, contributions could consider:
• How governance and policy interventions (e.g. infrastructure, public services, social protection, climate change adaptation initiatives, natural resource management, livelihood-related initiatives) influence how climate change is experienced locally and how households and individuals formulate and practice mobility as a response.
• The interplay between formal and informal institutions (e.g. international institutions, national government actors, local government agencies, hometown associations, migrant networks, NGOs, traditional institutions and religious authorities) in shaping climate-related mobility options and decisions.
• The role of governance practices across scales in relation to climate-related mobility, not least their possible effects, influences and dynamics.
The panel will include papers from the Governing Climate Mobility (GCM, www.diis.dk/projekter/governing-climate-mobility) research programme, based at research institutions in Ethiopia, Ghana and Denmark, but welcomes contributions from others working to nuance analyses of climate and mobility with a governance perspective.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 28 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper examines questions of agency in climate-related mobility and the role of institutional and structural factors in the actions and decisions of individuals and households.
Paper long abstract:
Research on climate-related mobility is generating a growing body of studies linking climate change to various types of mobility and immobility. The empirical material in these studies brings an increasingly diverse range of contexts - environmental, political, economic, institutional - to the discussions. However, common framings of climate-related mobility have tended to reduce its complexity, for example ‘climate refugees’ or ‘migration as adaptation.’ These framings reflect a limited conceptualization of the interplay between households’ and individuals’ agency and the structural factors that (1) shape how climate change is experienced locally and (2) enable or constrain households’ and individuals’ exercise of mobility in response. This risks underestimating the complex drivers at play in mobility decisions and practices. This paper seeks to raise and discuss this failing. Specifically, it seeks to unfold the role of governance and institutional factors in shaping agency in climate-related mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of COVID-19 and control the economic fallout left in its wake. Rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. In this paper, we examine the critical role of local government in coordinating pandemic responses. Drawing on empirical material from Himachal Pradesh, India, we show how local elected governments - known as panchayats - have served as a forum for communities to organize collective responses to local challenges, facilitated the delivery of state support, and otherwise served as a critical node for state and non-state actors to coordinate interventions. Local governments have been particularly important for safeguarding the welfare of the poor, who have been most affected by economic hardship. In the present case, we argue that the capacity of local institutions in Himachal Pradesh is rooted in histories of political change as well as long-term state support for these institutions in carrying out key grassroots state functions over the past several decades. The analysis underscores the need to move beyond a narrow focus on institution building to undertake longer-term investments in supporting more robust subnational democratic systems as a cornerstone of more resilient governance systems in the face of shock -- from COVID-19 and beyond. Governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy.
Paper short abstract:
We offer a look at how climate risk relocation policies are being implemented and contested in the informal settlements of Bogota, Colombia, based on voices from communities directly affected. This view may contribute to illuminate the approaches to resilience considering relevant aspects of justice
Paper long abstract:
This manuscript introduces the panoramic of informality, risk, and managed relocation in Bogota, Colombia, to contextualise the presentation of testimonies from local communities affected by climate risk and relocation policies, grouped around a civic platform called Arraigo.
The voices of Arraigo speak to attachments to place, the need for due recompense and respect for livelihoods, the importance of local perceptions (including accounts of the broader socio-ecological causes of risk), and the failure of inclusive urban governance in areas of poverty and informality. Uncovering such voices offers a different pathway for considering climate-related relocations and articulating alternative visions of risk reduction in urban spaces to remark that urban citizens must get involved in deliberating how relocation options are justified and enacted on the basis of understanding the multiple social and spatial dynamics that lead to the production of risk, and in the context of reshaping urban space in the interests of social justice and sustainability.
Community platforms such as Arraigo can play a vital role in making visible the human impacts of relocation and informing the ways in which relocation plans and policies can become adjusted in partnership with communities