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- Convenors:
-
Robert Farnan
(Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York)
Jonathan Ensor (University of York Stockholm Environment Institute)
Arabella Fraser (Open University)
Richard Friend (University of York)
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- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Global environmental justice
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Complementing scholarship addressing everyday development, we invite empirical, methodological, and theoretical papers that rethink climate politics, sustainable development, & participation, with a particular focus on capabilities & the limits participatory development places upon climate politics.
Long Abstract:
With the multiple crises brought about by COVID, the concerns of climate and development politics have become increasingly aligned around issues of systemic uncertainty, risk, and the politics of participation. In both fields these questions of governance resonate with notions of adaptation, mitigation, resilience, and vulnerability. Such agendas are frequently deployed by academics and practitioners as a way to frame and position the climate as an object or threat external to society - rather than as a constitutive and disruptive feature of human development processes. In practice this often leads to a disavowal of the messy power relations underlying the global sustainability project. This apolitical rendering is perhaps not surprising if we consider the liberal hegemony at the heart of adaptation orientated approaches to climate change. For some this is a contested legacy insofar as it proposes participation as the means through which to address global inequalities related to climate change. Yet developments in both fields have questioned the transformative potential of such agendas. They urge us to take seriously the political capabilities, as well as democratic deficits, constitutive of not only participation but also recognition. Complementing scholarship addressing bottom-up and everyday political development, we invite empirical, methodological, and theoretical papers that will rethink climate politics, sustainable development, and participation. Scholars and practitioners of climate change and development can draw important lessons from each other in order to critically address marginalisation and subjectivity and also reveal the longstanding conceptual and practical limits that participatory development has placed upon climate politics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 July, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between urban informality, planning, & the politics of knowledge infrastructure in Nepal & Thailand. It explores how urban planning documents are connected to marginalisation & shows their role in framing the political capabilities of informal-formal transitions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between urban (in)formality, planning, and the politics of knowledge infrastructure in the context of urbanisation and risk in Nepal and Thailand. Considerable energy in critical geography has been devoted to discussing the technocratic foundations of city planning. This has given rise, notably, to renditions of the urban expressed in the modern infrastructural ideal of the networked city. How the city has come to be defined and framed through scientific and technical expertise has never been more complex or contested. Critical development studies and urban theory have addressed the various categories and cartographies underlying urbanisation, pointing us towards the importance of discourse in sustaining and/or reconfiguring the socio-environmental risks and vulnerabilities of urban life. Yet there has been significantly less attention given to the role urban planning documents play in enabling or disabling the political capabilities of those residing in informal settlements. It is the aim of this paper to explore how city planning documents, as sociotechnical objects of urban knowledge infrastructure, are increasingly implicated in discursive processes of social marginalisation and risk allocation connected with the governance of informal-formal transitions. Building upon discussions in critical development studies and urban theory and drawing from the concept of knowledge infrastructures in science and technology studies (STS), this paper explores the urban planning narratives, strategies, and contestations that map out informal-formal transitions in Nepal and Thailand. It argues that the framing and/or mapping strategies constitutive of such transitions perform political functions beyond mere calculative land-use planning and zoning.
Paper short abstract:
The complexity of urban systems render the tracing of the root causes of everyday hazards either ontologically indeterminate or their identification epistemologically frustrated. This paper outlines the role of participatory processes in attributing responsibility for everyday hazards.
Paper long abstract:
While there is increasing documentation of the incidence and impact of everyday hazards such as fire and floods in urban informal settlements, their causal origins, transcendent of immediate triggers and drivers, remain underexplored. A range of methodological challenges arise in this context. The multiplicity of such hazards, the density of interactions between the hazards and other elements of the urban system, together with the non-linearity of causal relationships can render the root causes of everyday hazards either ontologically indeterminate or their identification epistemologically frustrated. The prospects for attributing responsibility and identifying potential entry points for interventions to attenuate future risks can thereby be negatively impacted. These challenges may however be conducive to amelioration through certain modalities of participation. Participation by those affected by disasters arising from ‘everyday’ hazards allows for these events and their impacts to be defined, selected and temporally and spatially bounded in order to permit the tracing of causal origins. Broad participation also holds out the promise of a more holistic understanding of the overall system from which ‘everyday’ hazards arise. Certain modalities of participation are also beneficial in making sense of and ultimately imputing the causation of disaster events arising from ‘everyday’ hazards and identifying pathways to reducing risk. This paper outlines initial results from a study in Nairobi being conducted by the Tomorrow’s Cities project that aims to identify the root causes of everyday hazards in urban contexts and details the role of varying modalities of participation in contending with the system complexity encountered.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the recognition and participation of indigenous and local knowledge holders is a pivotal precondition to co-produce meaningful Nature-based Solutions interventions and policies to achieve socio-environmental justice.
Paper long abstract:
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have excelled in climate policy as alternatives to achieving social, economic and environmental sustainability through the efficient management of nature and ecosystem services to solve environmental problems. A famous example of successful NbS is the use of mangrove plantations to protect coastal areas erosion and flooding. Nevertheless, NbS interventions do not provide social justice in and of themselves. The potential for the neoliberalisation of nature within NbS interventions can produce unbalanced trade-off affecting the poorer and marginalised population and exacerbate inequalities. This is related to critiques about the need for broad participation and adaptive governance of NbS. According to The World Bank, 15% of the world’s population living in poverty are indigenous people despite making up only 6.5% of the total population. Paradoxically, indigenous people safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity in their territories which places them under constant threats. This paper argues that the recognition and participation of indigenous and local knowledge holders (ILK) is a pivotal precondition to co-produce meaningful NbS interventions and policies to address socio-environmental justice. This hypothesis stems from a combined lens between Schlosberg's environmental justice theory and Fricker's epistemic justice theory. This paper presents two main contributions that the incorporation of ILK can provide to NbS. i)A holistic approach in contrast to reductionist approaches towards biodiversity and ecosystem management. ii) In addition, by considering local communities as self-organising systems there is potential to maximise the impact of co-management models in the local context if they are given proper autonomous leadership.