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:
-
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)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Global environmental justice
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 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 Friday 2 July, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the notions of knowledge infrastructure, political capabilities & procedural justice, this paper explores narratives of national development, urban planning & the implications these projects have on the livelihoods, environmental risks and vulnerabilities of local communities in Thailand.
Paper long abstract:
The persistent issue of inequalities in Thailand manifests in many forms, from socio-economic and political inequalities, geographical disparities of education, healthcare and access to public services, to social exclusion of marginalised community groups. Poverty and inequalities are often ascribed to be the source of the country’s deep political divide, posing challenges for long-term development and hindering economic prosperity to become a developed country. In an attempt to reconcile with the poor, the military government initiated a number of top-down approaches in the form of development strategies and policy-based campaigns. By drawing on the concepts of knowledge infrastructure, political capabilities and procedural justice, the study explores the dominant narratives of national development policies, political landscape of urban planning and practices, and the implications of urban, infrastructure and industrial development projects on the livelihoods, environmental risks and climate vulnerability of local communities. The lack of meaningful participation and recognition as well as misrepresentation of social groups in development planning and decision-making processes exacerbate the issues of marginalisation and inequalities of not only informal communities, but also local communities whose preferred livelihoods are not aligned with politically constructed consensus.
Paper short abstract:
The paper reviewed the Kirtipur Housing Project's participatory approach to understand political capabilities. It shows how poor amends the link with state and causes changes in planning form. It concludes that local initiative must offer space and ways for expression of poor's knowledge in debates.
Paper long abstract:
In the Global South context, the strategies for access to urban infrastructure systems must bring forward the political capability approach and focus on governance structures and resources that empower the poor to participate in political action. The political capability approach makes a closer examination of the normative components of political engagement that contributes to the poor's mobilisation and sustained political action and unveils the knowledge that facilitates them to negotiate. With participation as a prominent aspect of the political capabilities, the paper explores how participation can improve poor's knowledge, reshape their political networks, and impact the planning patterns. This paper made the retrospective study of the Kirtipur Housing Project's participatory approach during the project's initiation, operation, completion, and post-handover. The essential data sources were the interviews and narratives of participating stakeholders. Secondary data sources were newspaper articles, project documents, and different peer-reviewed articles. The paper discusses how the poor unveils and builds the knowledge that enables them to understand the local rules of planning and appropriate strategies and networks and triggers the local governance structures' adaptation to include the poor in the planning process. The paper further explores grass root-level organisations' roles that facilitate the poor in building and reshaping the links beyond the local level to the state and global levels. The paper concludes that for political capabilities, the participatory approach requires to develop methods that enable the poor to express their values and preferences as planning-comprehendible knowledge and then muddle through the political space of debates and negotiations.