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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that new ways of infrastructuring aquatic environments are transforming who is responsible for environmental management. It argues for a comparative research agenda regarding how this might produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship’ in Japan and elsewhere.

Paper long abstract

States and citizens worldwide are experimenting with how to adapt their aquatic and periaquatic environments to climate change. Many are expanding existing systems, like seawalls and dikes. But some are also deploying new nature-based or ‘green’ infrastructures incorporating natural entities and dynamics into water management. As such infrastructural sediments, soils, and plants proliferate, however, they not only transform where and how water flows. Those infrastructures also constitute socio-political experiments where new ideas and ideals, practices, publics, institutions, and even citizens may be posited and prototyped in dialogue with changing material conditions. Green infrastructures thus form fertile sites for examining a crucial issue facing many nations: how adapting to climate change alters democratic systems.

Drawing on comparative preliminary fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Louisiana Delta, and the Netherlands, this paper hypothesizes that new ways of infrastructuring environments are transforming who and what is responsible for environmental management. In Japan, for example, those advocating green infrastructure often argue it exceeds official categories in terms of both knowledge and practice. Cultivating it requires knowledge not tabulated by official statistics—for example, experiential knowledge regarding where water flows—and enrolling those holding that knowledge, from residents to entrepreneurs, into initiatives creating and managing infrastructural greenery. Green infrastructure thus requires cultivating a multitude of new entanglements and subjects, or “making the people who can make greenery” (midori wo tsukuru hito wo tsukuru koto).

Building on this hypothesis, the paper argues for a comparative research agenda regarding how adaptive infrastructural transformations gather new publics and produce new forms of ‘climate citizenship.’ By ‘climate citizenship,’ it refers to a form of situated globalism emerging from the articulation of existing, local social contracts (with their varying distributions of rights and responsibilities) and climate change as a global phenomenon. It introduces a comparative research project examining this across three areas which interact with each other closely: Tokyo Bay, the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Delta, and the Louisiana Delta. By examining how infrastructure modes travel across these, and with what effects, the project asks how addressing climate change goes hand in hand with reshaping citizenry, political coalitions, and more.