Paper short abstract:

How do inhabitants of West-African coastal cities perceive and react to the socio-ecological violence of climate change? This paper will show how questioning day-to-day activism and practices of contestation in two vulnerable cities can uncover political and social changes at the Anthropocene’s era.

Paper long abstract:

The IPCC report warns that the Gulf of Guinea is among the regions of the world most exposed to climate change. The coastal cities of Lagos and Cotonou are vulnerable, as their rapid urban growth is taking place between the lagoon and the ocean.

Urban Political Ecology has shown that environmental change is intrinsically a social and political process with socially differentiated consequences (Myers, 2016, Ernston and Swyngedouw, 2018). In Lagos and Cotonou, urban engineering projects embedded in neoliberal practices of urban growth are developed with an intention to protect the coastal settlements from the damages of water. Meanwhile coastal populations are seen mainly as passive and vulnerable actors.

I want to show in this paper how understanding climate change as a socio-ecological violence (Silver, 2018) and shifting from normative perceptions of vulnerability and resilience, can uncover quite invisible processes of contestations and resistances. Hence, this paper will present my double focus to enquire the political transformations and social changes at the Anthropocene's era. First, analysing and comparing mode of actions and social positions of the few environmental activists in the two cities can reveal the political role of direct collective action in the socio-natural processes. Second, people's perceptions and knowledges of environmental and urban changes are key to understand the construction of identities and social and political alterities (Arango, Guitard, and Lavie. 2022) and forms of collective organisation to adapt to change can be understood as acts of resistance to socio-natural processes (Scott, 2019).