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Professor Jay Mistry, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London
Co-Director, Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society
Co-Director, Cobra Collective CIC

Jay Mistry is a Professor of Environmental Geography. Her research interests include environmental management and governance, participatory visual methods and Indigenous geographies. Her work involves supporting local livelihoods and biodiversity conservation, action research using participatory video and Indigenous rights. She is also interested in different types of fire knowledge, and how these can be brought together for more effective and socially just fire management and governance.

Addressing social and environmental justice through creating spaces for dialogue 

In this presentation, I will draw from my experiences of working with Indigenous peoples in South America within the areas of conservation and environmental governance to reflect on questions about ethics, equity and justice. Indigenous and local people have very different capabilities to participate and meaningfully contribute to the deliberative processes of governance in the context of power imbalances that are all too common within conservation and environmental arenas. And although there is increasing recognition of the importance to listen to, and for potential influence by, diverse voices from marginalised groups on current and evolving social and ecological debates, the ways in which Indigenous and local peoples participate do not always engender inclusive dialogue. We need to think about innovative and contextualised approaches to address disparities in participation that break down established models of knowledge generation, agency and relationality. Using examples from my collaborative work on traditional knowledge, protected areas management, fire governance and crafting, I will highlight how participatory video and video-mediated dialogue, intercultural meetings and peer-to-peer exchanges can help shift unequal power relations and enable Indigenous and local people to surface and share their knowledge and experiences, thus generating counter-narratives to the mainstream deficit models of conservation and development. At the same time, I will show that this work is not without its messiness, difficulties and challenges, and so requires a longer-term commitment for change.

Chair: Mike Goodman

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University, where he is professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective.

He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), Capitalocene o Antropocene? (Ombre Corte, 2017), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016), and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press, 2017). His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011). He coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network.

Civilizing Projects in the Capitalocene, or, Imperialism Developmentalisms in the Web of Life

Capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg quipped, deploys “force as a permanent weapon.” From its origins in the long sixteenth century, geohistorical force has been, in shifting configurations, material and geocultural. It entailed not just soldiers and slavers but priests, magistrates, and ideologists. For every scorched earth campaign of pacification – a term coined by Jesuits in seventeenth-century Brazil – there was a Civilizing Project. What we came to call Development after 1949 was a novel expression of an imperialist project in play since Columbus. Across this era, reinvented ever since, a new ideological vocabulary took shape around Man, Nature, and Civilization. Marx and Engels would call these ruling ideas. All three are soaked in the “bloody discipline” of class formation, imperial violence, and capital accumulation. Nature, above all, became everything imperial bourgeoisies did wish to pay for. In this keynote, Jason W. Moore surveys the long and entangled world history of Civilizing Projects, great waves of class formation and capital accumulation, and the environment-making movements that shaped them. Bringing a world-historical reading of ideology, world power, and environmental history to bear, Moore speaks to the global faultlines of climate justice politics and the danger of Anthropocenic thinking in the twenty-first century. 

Chair: Uma Kambhampati (in-person)
Discussant: Neha Hui (in-person)

Coleen is a Distinguished Professor in the Global Change Institute at the University of Witwatersrand, with expertise on climate change and adaptation, working particularly at international and local governance scales.

Stories from the South – the interplay of climate science, ‘action’ and implications for development.

Abstract: The science of climate change and variability has grown over recent years and is now consolidated into various messages, actions and outcomes for a range of actors including decision makers across scales and sectors. Those directly impacted by the vagaries of climate, including variability, severe and extreme storms and droughts, are often the marginal who invariably can have limited agency and ‘voice’ in surfacing and fore grounding their lived experiences and contexts. The interfaces between such contexts are addressed focussing both on the science of climate change and the need for action.

First, the science of climate change, including the state of the science and projections for southern Africa, is presented drawing particular attention to the vulnerability of the region as being a ‘climate hot spot’. National and local cases of climate policy and linkages to development are then explored. The challenges to include climate change into already crowded bureaucratic agendas, planning and development actions are shown to potentially erode development gains, particularly as one moves into future scenario planning modes.

The disconnects between policy and local actions and implementation are also highlighted focussing in particular on recent City-led climate adaptation planning efforts. Acknowledgement of local, bottom-up contributions in climate change actions and the implications and opportunities of such praxis by various actors (e.g. civic society including the youth) are profiled. Inclusive, co-production approaches are finally interrogated, illustrating the value or additional barriers that such approaches can bring in local development contexts.

Chair: Emmanuel Essah

Camelia Dewan wrote:
I’m wondering if it is useful to ask people what their ‘climate problems’ are? Perhaps their environmental problems are more complex and by already suggesting problems are climate-related, we may barring ourselves from better understanding environmental processes on the ground. These are issues I am myself concerned about in my broader research on the politics of climate knowledge production, particularly how donors and capitalist actors can promote age-old interventions as ‘adaptation solutions’.

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