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- Convenor:
-
Stephen Collier
(University of California, Berkeley)
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- Chair:
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Andreas Folkers
(Justus-Liebig University Frankfurt Institute for Social Research)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel examines sites in South Africa, Pakistan, Australia, and the United States to consider the forms of futurity—governmental norms, types of kn.owledge, technologies, ethical orientations, material processes—that are taking shape around climate adaptation, mitigation, loss, and damage
Long Abstract:
We often think of the unfolding of climate futures in terms of the dramas of planning and preparedness for the future(s) of climate change: Ideally, we anticipate climate change and its effects, and address them, either by reducing emissions or by planning adaptation measures that will reduce climate change impacts, as in much discussed and scrutinized climate action plans and climate adaptation plans. The absence of such anticipation and preparatory action is generally understood in terms of failure – failure to anticipate, failure to accept scientific evidence, and failure to act. Yet it is increasingly clear that forms of futurity are already unfolding around climate change that cannot readily be captured as matters of anticipatory knowledge and preparatory action (or its absence). Much adaptation is spurred by extreme events that precipitate unplanned change, or by anticipations of the future that have no explicit relationship to climate change but instead focus on future financial gain or loss, anticipations of economic development (or fears about decline), or “local” disasters. How can STS scholars characterize these increasingly prominent forms of futurity, beyond a negative reference to the absence of planning and anticipation? How are they shaping future trajectories of climate adaptation and mitigation? The papers in this panel examine a diverse range of sites (in Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, and the U.S.) to consider the distinct forms of futurity—governmental norms, types of knowledge, technologies, ethical orientations, material processes etc.—that are taking shape around climate adaptation, mitigation, loss, and damage.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Savannah Cox (University of Sheffield)
Long abstract:
In recent years, historic blackouts have prompted large firms, affluent households, and wealthy provinces in South Africa to install rooftop solar and independent power at unprecedented rates. While some commentators have heralded these developments as evidence of massive, ‘bottom-up’ energy transitions underway in the country, they are also constitutive of a particular climate adaptation pathway. Large-scale defection from the nation’s grid, some officials have warned, may drain the coffers of rate-dependent municipalities and South Africa’s state-owned electricity enterprise, pushing the country on a downward economic trajectory that will greatly constrain its ability to make investments in costly, collective climate-adaptive infrastructure. Drawing on interviews with officials from increasingly ‘off grid’ housing associations, firms, and provincial governments, as well as energy and financial experts, the paper explores (1) elite infrastructural secession (Fatti et al 2023) from South Africa’s national electricity grid, and (2) its implications for how researchers inquire about climate adaptation and climate futures more broadly. Although infrastructural secession is partially motivated by concerns about the country’s climate-changed future and genuinely held desires to ‘go green,’ I suggest that it is also rooted in longstanding (white) elite efforts to maintain symbolic and material boundaries from a ‘broken’ majority rule state. Thus, I conclude that inasmuch as researchers privilege representations of the future when examining what spurs collective climate action and shapes climate futures, they must also attend to extemporaneous actions in the present: specifically, the large- and small-scale ways in which public-private boundaries are (re)made in response to environmental flux.
Caylee Hong (University of California, Berkeley)
Short abstract:
This paper examines the development of Long Beach's climate polices alongside the city's ongoing oil production to examine deferral as a mode of planning and governance in Southern California.
Long abstract:
In 2022, Long Beach, California approved the city’s first Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) to help “[prepare] for an uncertain climate future.” According to CAAP materials, “Climate change is happening now, so we need to act quickly.” The plan seeks to “reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, prepare the community for the impacts of climate change, improve the quality of life and enhance economic vitality in Long Beach.” During the seven-year-long process of developing the CAAP, local oil production emerged as an urgent matter of public concern—namely, the financial, environmental, and ethical stakes of city’s ownership and operation of the Wilmington Oil Field, the third largest field in the contiguous United States. Drawing upon the CAAP and its place within the city’s climate agenda, I argue that deferral is a mode of planning—not merely a failure to act. While the CAAP mentions reducing emissions from oil operations and lowering demand for fossil fuels, the phase-out of local extraction is aspirational. According to the CAAP, it will “eventually” happen but it is unclear when or how. Meanwhile, the city is challenging State laws that would expedite the phase-out. Drawing upon “fossil materialities” (Folkers 2021) and risk (Beck 1995, Luhman 1993), I explore how residents, city leaders, and the city’s oil bureaucracy navigate CAAP goals, climate risks, and the temporally-uncertain (but “inevitable”) phase-out of oil. I ask how deferrals, delays, and stalling are practices of governance and planning that may exceed mere hypocrisy or inaction.
Maira Hayat
Short abstract:
This paper builds on ethnographic and archival research on one of the world’s largest irrigation infrastructure networks, fed by Himalayan glacial melt. The paper asks what we learn about temporalities and infrastructures of the political in a changing climate when we think with silt.
Long abstract:
This paper builds on ethnographic and archival research on one of the world’s largest irrigation infrastructure networks, fed by Himalayan glacial melt, and administered by one of the largest public bureaucracies in Pakistan. It will trace the travels of water from a dam, through canals, into distributaries, then into watercourses, and finally onto agricultural land through outlets, by focusing on two extremities of the network—a dam and an outlet. The outlet marks the physical end of the Irrigation Department’s jurisdiction; through it, irrigation water passes from the Department’s control to water users. The Irrigation Department is meant to design outlets to specifications that enable water to flow to a fixed area. But often they are built smaller than that so less water flows through them. Then, among mediations of sociality, political and bureaucratic authority, and manipulation of silt, the outlet is enlarged, and more water flows onto water users’ fields. The paper asks what we learn about temporalities and infrastructures of the political in a changing climate when we think with silt.
Timothy Neale (Deakin University)
Long abstract:
During and after the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires in southeast Australia, I witnessed the performance of two temporal orientations towards the massive infernos that sprawled across at least 8 million hectares of forest and grassland. Amongst climate activists and others, these fires were an evental rupture, tangible proof of a climate emergency demanding urgent mass mobilisation. “This changes everything,” protestors announced. Prominent fire researchers declared the fires “a wake-up call.” Appearing before one of several government inquiries, a former fire chief summarised that: “There’s a need for a step change in how we deal [with the enemy] - the enemy being climate change.” Alternately, my interlocutors within emergency management revealed a different orientation, addressing the disaster as a climate-forced pulse within familiar and interminable government rhythms of crisis, inquiry, and reform. While intimately attuned to the increasing flammability of Australian landscapes, shaped by ongoing histories of colonialism and extractivism, they were nonetheless confident about the political and cultural grip of preparedness and resilience thinking. As two analysts told me in 2020, this was a “SNAFU or ‘situation normal, all fucked up.’” Several years later, these emergency professionals appear to be correct, with the urgency of Black Summer now having been domesticated into orthodox programs of risk planning, monitoring and compliance. Revisiting the temporalisations of the Black Summer disaster, this paper considers the extent to which critical reflections on emergency logics offer possible routes out of an untenable “situation normal.”