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- Convenors:
-
Angela Mae Minas
(The University of Manchester)
Rachel Carmenta (University of East Anglia)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Palmer 1.02
- Sessions:
- Thursday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This session will explore poverty and climate change, with a critical focus on interpretations of what constitutes poverty and how these are reflected in climate and development projects. We aim to extend current understandings in order to legitimise decolonised adaptation and mitigation responses.
Long Abstract:
Actions on climate change interrelate and interact with multiple dimensions of poverty and inequality, and often seek to achieve some form of win-win. In this session, our aim is to critically evaluate how poverty is currently understood and interpreted in climate-conservation and development research and practice in order to ground, legitimise and make relevant, decolonised adaptation and mitigation responses that do not exacerbate inequality.
This panel will bring together papers that use multiple disciplinary perspectives to unpack what constitutes poverty, explore synergies and tradeoffs between climate, conservation and development goals, and examine what achieving net zero could look like in low- and middle-income country contexts. We will present case studies and empirical work at different scales of action (local, national, global) and geographies. Our aim is to focus much needed attention to Global South research on poverty and climate change that is otherwise dominated by Western perceptions of what it means to be poor, to be impacted by climate change and explore the concept of being 'forced' into the pursuit of 'resilience' in a time of climate emergency. We will discuss the implications of these issues on policy and the role of research in decolonising current approaches in climate and development planning.
The panel will be convened by theme members of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research's Overcoming Poverty with Climate Action and will cover diverse geographies, disciplines and theoretical lenses.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 29 June, 2023, -Rachel Carmenta (University of East Anglia)
Paper short abstract:
This talk will provide an overview of the imperative to ground conceptions of poverty with local realities.
Paper long abstract:
Integrated landscape approaches (ILAs) are gaining momentum, broad interest in their potential stems from the possibility of reconciling climate, conservation and development imperatives. A number of ILAs have already been implemented around the world, including the forested tropical landscapes of Latin America. These landscapes are often home to traditional communities, including small-scale farmers living closely to the land. The potential of ILAs to contribute to the values that matter most to the human well-being of rural populations, depends on first understanding what values are most salient to traditional communities. However, the plurality of values – that is the material, subjective and relational types of values - that exist has not been given full acknowledgement in ILA implementation, or evaluation. Rather, a tendency to focus on pre-determined, externally defined, and material values dominates research and practice. Crucially these tendencies risk undermining the potential contribution of ILAs to local communities because they can invisible the values that matter most, and in worse cases, can generate social-cultural harms. This empirical work sought to bring visibility to the place-based values that matter most. Using questionnaire data from >300 rural traditional peoples living across four types of landscape intervention in the Brazilian Amazon (two extractive reserves, one protected area and one intensified agriculture landscape), we present data on how local people define well-being and identify the types of values that matter most. Using these place-based worldviews as a starting point, we use perception-based impact assessment to understand how distinct interventions, across a land-sparing, land-sharing spectrum, contribute to locally prioritised values and well-being. This research is geared to inform ILA design that can enhance what matters most to local communities, and offers a method that can be used to gather local perceptions and views that are essential to justice and equity in ILA implementation.
Hilman S. Fathoni (Monash University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation offers an invitation to engage with so-called energy poverty in the Global South differently. Based on the author’s ongoing ethnographic research in rural Indonesia, it will discuss some reflections that emerge from pursuing such possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I offer my invitation to rethink how we conceptualise energy poverty in the Global South in a manner that moves beyond its modernist framings. In doing so, I follow the calls within the literature to problematise the traditional vs. modern energy binary that continues to permeate the energy poverty and development discourse, while also taking seriously the mundanity of such everyday energy realities. Resulting from such an approach is the recognition of how people’s lived experiences of energy poverty are consequently shaped by the multitude of power relations, as well as retaining their singularities that elude any effort of simplistic categorisation. Inspired by narrative phenomenology in anthropology and human geography, I seek to understand people’s own appraisals of what constitutes energy poverty as they move through their everyday lives, and how such world-making projects are affectively emergent from which questions of hopes, despairs and anxieties coalesce into an unnamed mosaic. Indeed, this unknowability is what renders energy poverty difficult to represent, but also opens up the possibility to rethink it differently. This quality also brings up a different picture of “energy poor” subjects that do not simply conform to the Enlightenment ideals, whereby rationalities are valorised as the cornerstone for a (linear) improvement. In such stories, far from staying idle, everyday materialities are becoming central to yet inseparable from the continuous remaking of people’s energy experiences. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic work in rural Indonesia, I bring these alternative stories alive for reimagining energy poverty otherwise.
Chris Walsh (University of Manchester) Sarah Mander (University of Manchester) Jaise Kuriakose (Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) Amanda April (University of Cape Town) Alejandro Gallego-Schmid Jhud Mikhail Aberilla (University of the Philippines Diliman) Carlos Gaete-Morales (DIW Berlin) Velma Mukoro (The World Bank Group) Samira Garcia-Freites (CIIEG, Promigas) Angela Mae Minas (The University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This review engages with inherent challenges in pursuing other SDGs through increased energy access. It draws on experiences from a range of 8 contexts in the Global South to consider key areas of future research and action for consideration by stakeholders and researchers working in this space
Paper long abstract:
Under the banner of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), governments, industry, and civil society organisations have supported many energy access projects since 2015. Notably, funding and investments allotted to renewable energy are regarded not only to provide ‘energy for all’ but also support the delivery of other SDGs related to climate change, food security, health, and poverty reduction, among others. With less than 10 years left to meet the SDG 7 targets, it is timely to take stock and examine how the provision of access to energy is driving development initiatives, impacting local communities, and influencing governance processes. This paper offers a critical review and analysis of the impact of access to energy projects based on empirical work from eight country case studies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It interrogates how these projects contribute towards achieving SDG 7 and other sustainable development goals, highlights challenges, and then draws lessons for research, policy and development practice. To advance SDGs, it recommends action in four areas: addressing rural-urban disparities, ensuring that energy is linked to sustainable outcomes, balancing top-down and bottom-up agendas, and appraising implications of techno-economic factors.
Mark Tebboth (Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research)
Paper short abstract:
Humanity faces a myriad of social and environmental risks which threaten global development. Drawing on empirical research from countries in the Global South, we synthesise a set of principles to promote more equitable forms of responses to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
Paper long abstract:
The imperative to take action on and respond to global crises becomes ever more pressing as carbon emissions continue to rise and biodiversity losses show no sign of abating. Humanity is at a crossroad, incremental responses to this myriad of challenges appear increasingly inadequate and the demand for transformative action is growing. Yet these calls for action are superimposed onto a canvas of global injustice that not only created the climate and biodiversity crises but also risks reproducing the same structural conditions and outcomes that have resulted in the hugely inequitable global patterns of development that we see today. At the simplest of levels, those who are least responsible for causing the problems we see around us are being expected to bear the highest of costs. Given these circumstances, we present eight vignettes from research undertaken in low- and middle- income countries that explore how climate, energy, and biodiversity interact with multiple dimensions of poverty and inequality. Through these vignettes focusing on issues including adaptation, conservation, resource extraction, just transition, and social innovation, we synthesise a set of principles that we hope will support more equitable responses to the climate and biodiversity crises. Such knowledge is essential as the demand for action grows ever more urgent and the calls for increasingly radical and transformational responses become ever louder. Ultimately, efforts to realise a more sustainable future will only succeed if they are considered to be fair and legitimate and address some of the fundamental social injustices that we see today.