Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

The chapter critiques development and disaster management frameworks for perpetuating inequality and capitalism’s unequal distribution of the future. Using the 2024 floods in Porto Alegre, we explore transnational grief and solidarity as pathways to epistemic justice and reimagined development.

Paper long abstract:

This chapter examines the limitations of mainstream disaster management and development frameworks in addressing structural drivers of vulnerability and inequality. Using the 2024 floods in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and their reverberations in London as a case study, we explore the unequal distribution of the future shaped by capitalism and climate collapse. By critiquing international efforts such as the UN-led Sustainable Development Goals and Disaster Risk Reduction frameworks, we highlight how these approaches impose Eurocentric visions of progress on the Global South, perpetuating a temporal disconnect between the promises of development and the immediate realities of climate catastrophe.

Drawing on ethnographic field notes, we recount how the floods materialized global discourses of development and climate crises in local contexts, raising critical questions about international solidarity and epistemic justice. Contrasting our experiences — Matheus, displaced in Porto Alegre, a city once hailed as a model for the future, and Luisa, based in London and disconnected from family in Eldorado do Sul, an impoverished town submerged due to Porto Alegre's anti-flood infrastructure — we complicate binaries such as local/global and specific/universal. Crucially, through the lens of transnational grief, we propose a shift from individual positionality towards a broader understanding of shared global vulnerabilities.

The chapter contributes to debates on the future of development studies by calling for a reimagined approach that addresses climate coloniality, neoliberal governance, and the maldistribution of futurity. Emphasizing transnational solidarity and epistemic justice, we argue that recognizing these inequalities is crucial for global social emancipation.