Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how colonial histories and discursive framings shape hurricane vulnerability and mobility in the Eastern Caribbean. Using governmentality and political ecology, it shows how “vulnerabilisation” renders residents disposable, reproducing colonial inequalities in climate governance.

Presentation long abstract

The lived experiences of people affected by hurricanes are deeply intertwined with discursive framings. Who has to (be) move(d) and who gets to stay amid increasing climate impacts is hierarchical and embedded in (neo)colonial inequalities. Combining insights from governmentality analysis and political ecology, this paper analyses how process of “vulnerabilisation” frame some communities as unsafe and “inevitably uninhabitable” (Farbotko et al., 2023), thereby rendering them “disposable” (Weatherill, 2023). Drawing on empirical research from the Eastern Caribbean, we show how colonial land use and settlement patterns continue to shape exposure to hurricanes and access to protection, shelter and evacuation infrastructure. Climate (im)mobility governance often prioritizes wealthy tourists over local residents, legitimizing resettlement from “physically vulnerable” areas. Our findings indicate that such governance reproduces colonial patterns of vulnerability, leading to unequal mobility outcomes. When reframing vulnerability as actively reproduced, transforming those structural drivers that (re)produce it, becomes a key solution for climate resilience.

Farbotko, C., Boas, I., Dahm, R., Kitara, T., Lusama, T., & Tanielu, T. (2023). Reclaiming open climate adaptation futures. Nature Climate Change, 13(8), 750–751. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01733-1

Weatherill, C. K. (2023). Resisting climate change vulnerability: Feminist and decolonial insights. International Politics. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00523-y

Presentation short abstract

This paper focuses on the concepts of vulnerability and resistance in climate politics, and how colonial historical discourses relate to material outcomes. Climate change is posed as a form of sacrificial colonialism and a site of struggle over whose lives are protected and whose vulnerabilised.

Presentation long abstract

This paper focuses on the concepts of vulnerability and resistance in climate politics, focusing on how colonial historical discourses relate to material outcomes. Climate change is posed as a form of colonial violence and a site of struggle over whose lives are to be enriched and whose vulnerabilised, and the discursive justifications for the ensuing inequalities.

Drawing on a new book, to be published with Liverpool University Press later this year, this paper first outlines the critique of vulnerability, drawing on feminist arguments around paternalism and victimisation. It then offers an alternative: a breaking down of vulnerability into the concepts of precarity, which builds on the work of political economists; grievability, which builds on the work of Judith Butler, and ‘islanding’ a resistance concept that builds on Pacific Studies. Taken together, this paper turns vulnerability discourse on its head and tries to relocate these conversations within the reality of climate change.

Presentation short abstract

In 2022, a dam-related flood inundated Saramaka Maroon lands in Suriname. Centuries of colonial and neo-colonial processes of vulnerabilisation underlie this flood. However, ahistorical, climate-focused explanations propagated by the state can deflect responsibility from dominant actors.

Presentation long abstract

Extreme rainfall landed in the Surinamese Amazon at the beginning of 2022. Much of this water flowed into the reservoir of the Afobaka hydroelectricity dam. The state-owned company managing the dam decided to spill water in order to protect the dam’s integrity, leading to the three month-long inundation of downstream Saramaka Maroon’s houses and lands—lands that the Maroons were forcibly relocated to due to the very construction of the Afobaka dam in 1964. Now, four years later, the flood’s impacts are still visible in destroyed houses and subsistence farming lands. The Saramaka Maroons, whose ontologies are rooted in centuries of anti-colonial and state resistance and trauma from the 1964 forced relocation, see the recent flood as an intended ‘second relocation’ initiated by state and continuation of history. In contrast, the state speak of an unprecedented ‘climate disaster’. This paper traces the historical processes of marginalisation and vulnerabilisation that underlie the 2022 flood, from Dutch colonial violence in response to marronage to neocolonial, extractive development strategies that led to the construction of the Afobaka dam. It shows how the state’s climate change narrative, supported by technical data and reports, obscures these historical processes and deflect responsibility away from the state. This analysis challenges the notion of the (neo-colonial) state as a legitimate advocate of climate justice, as often portrayed in global climate governance. Instead, it reveals how dominant actors can exploit climate change to evade accountability and impede equitable restitution that could lead to justice.

Presentation short abstract

This paper will present ethnographic material conducted in informal urban settlements in Blacksands, Vanuatu. I argue for analysis that moves beyond paternalist climate security discourse that see all Pacific women as vulnerable to climate change impacts, or as the ‘virtuous victims’ of disasters.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the advocacy of Pacific women leaders, discussions of climate change and gender regularly position Pacific women, and particularly those from atoll nations, as vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Jolly 2019). In broader development and climate change narratives Pacific women are often named as the ‘most vulnerable’ victims, or the ‘virtuous victims’, of climate change. These narratives tell stories of how Pacific women are more likely to care about the environment, or for family and children (Alexeyeff 2020: 2; Jolly 2019; Scarr 2015). These discussions remind us that vulnerability, like resilience, is often an empty signifier, a constructed process designed for political effect and purpose (McDonnell 2020; Wetherill 2023).

This paper will present ethnographic material conducted in informal urban settlements in Blacksands on the edge of the capital Port Vila, Vanuatu in the wake of the two category four cyclones hitting in a 48 hour period (Kevin and Judy) in March 2023. Using detailed interviews, I argue that climate change induced disaster can create different outcomes depending on how Pacific people are situated in relation to various aspects of agency and resistance. In this way, analysis moves beyond paternalist climate security discourse that see all Pacific women as vulnerable to climate change impacts, or as the supposedly ‘virtuous victims’ of climate change and disasters. Rather, it attempts to locate gendered agency along a locus of intersecting aspects of identity, thereby attempting to map a more complex approach to emplaced, localized concepts of gender, (im)mobility, climate change and land.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Dutch hydraulic expertise, now framed as essential heritage for climate solutions, shaped Jakarta's current water vulnerabilities. Conceiving such vulnerabilities as colonial inheritance, this paper challenges universal knowledge claims and narrow heritage narratives.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how Dutch hydraulic expertise - which has shaped landscapes and societies across its former empire and beyond - continues to structure climate futures in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on archival research in the Netherlands and Jakarta, I trace how the contemporary significance of Dutch hydraulic expertise is actively produced through heritage-making and memory work. In the Netherlands, this process frames the nation's history of controlling “unruly” water as exceptional, positioning Dutch expertise as indispensable for climate solutions in delta regions worldwide. In Jakarta, however, I show that the uneven exposure to flooding, subsidence, and ecological degradation now understood as climate risks cannot be separated from the hydraulic infrastructure that fundamentally restructured the city’s waterscape during Dutch colonial rule. Reading these sites together, I argue that repair and ruination are not separate processes but a coupled trajectory: the same expertise now positioned as essential to Jakarta's climate future is also implicated in the city's ongoing urban ruination. By attending to the ruination contemporary climate and heritage discourse occlude and reproduce, this paper unsettles the primacy of expert, universal(ising) knowledge, rendering other means of climate repair thinkable, beyond its gaze and recursive logics. It also challenges prevailing conceptions of heritage as a carefully curated historical essence of community or nation, foregrounding instead the complex inheritances typically excluded from such narrow views.

Presentation short abstract

This paper will explore colonial legacies in contemporary Indigenous-led relocation projects on the east coast of New Caledonia. It will investigate the role of historical processes in the construction of risks and the political dynamics maintaining Kanak families ‘at risk’.

Presentation long abstract

Climate vulnerability affecting Indigenous Kanak communities on the east coast of New Caledonia (Western Pacific) is inextricably linked to the history of forced displacement and the deep socio-political legacies of settler colonialism. In this French overseas territory, climate-induced relocation projects exemplify the connections between colonial legacies, ongoing decolonization (Trépied, 2025) and climate change issues. The challenges certain Kanak families face when relocating to safer areas lie at the intersection of a land tenure system that limits access to available space, structural inequalities impacting the political and economic capacities of customary and local authorities, as well as the 'discursive politics' (Mikulewicz, 2020) of institutional adaptation models that perpetuate ‘Western’ ways of valuing risks (Sultana, 2019; Eriksen et al. 2021).

Through multi-sited fieldworks involving 54 semi-structured interviews with institutional actors and customary authorities conducted between 2024 and 2025, this paper will analyse how colonial history has created relationships of dependency by concentrating political, economic and land ownership power away from local communities (Marino & Ribot, 2012). Indeed, several Kanak families are asking for institutions to develop the land and construct the infrastructures necessary for relocation since 2010. Drawing on critical vulnerability perspectives (Cameron, 2012; Jacobs, 2019; Barnett, 2020), we will question in how far delays to the completion of customary relocation projects — which could be described as 'forced immobility' — are the outcome of power relations, historical legacies and structures of domination. These are perpetuated through institutional prioritisation and adaptation paradigms which struggle to include relocation on the political agenda.

Presentation short abstract

In Bel Ombre, Mauritius, colonial legacies, coastal tourism development, and climate risks shape classed and racialized vulnerabilities, while collective memory and local organizing generate emergent, contested forms of resilience.

Presentation long abstract

Bel Ombre, a former sugar plantation village in southwest Mauritius, has undergone profound transformation following the 1999 closure of its sugar mill and the rapid expansion of high-end coastal tourism and real-estate development since the early 2000s. Using a community-engaged and multi-disciplinary approach, this research examines how residents experience these socio-environmental changes alongside increasing exposure to climate-related events such as flooding. Drawing on participatory mapping, focus groups, and interviews, we show how collective memories of the plantation landscape continue to shape place attachment and frame residents’ perceptions of vulnerability, particularly through the politics of access to coastal spaces and decision-making. At the same time, we identify emergent, contested forms of resilience produced through collective action and self-organisation around coastal management and adaptation. We argue that vulnerability in Bel Ombre is shaped by enduring colonial pasts and presents through classed and racialized relations of access, while these same historical memories foster the conditions for politicized, community-driven resilience to take shape.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the conflict-induced climate crisis in Jammu and Kashmir, showing how (neo)colonial structures and militarization create ecological degradation and human vulnerability. It redefines vulnerability as resistance, highlighting Kashmiri resilience and decolonial climate agency.

Presentation long abstract

This paper situates the conflict-induced climate crisis in Jammu and Kashmir within the broader debates on climate justice and political ecology. It argues that the region exemplifies how colonial and neocolonial systems generate both ecological degradation and human vulnerability. Kashmir’s environmental decline is not a natural by-product of conflict but a result of historical power asymmetries and epistemic violence that have shaped the governance of land, nature, and people. The study shifts the focus from “natural vulnerability” to a vulnerability that is deliberately produced and sustained through militarization and territorial control.

In one of the world’s most militarized regions, political occupation and environmental change intersect to create forms of slow violence that alter both landscapes and livelihoods. Deforestation, glacial melting, disrupted river systems, and the loss of livelihoods reflect India’s extractive governance and securitization, where military and infrastructural projects redefine ecological and human relations.

Drawing on the concept of vulnerabilisation, the paper examines how Kashmiris are simultaneously portrayed as “threats” and “victims” within dominant climate narratives, reinforcing hierarchies that determine whose lives are valued. Yet, vulnerability in Kashmir also becomes a site of resistance. Through indigenous ecological knowledge and collective resilience, Kashmiri communities reclaim their relationship with land and environment. Their lived experiences articulate an alternative environmental consciousness that challenges colonial modernity and the depoliticized discourse of climate change, transforming vulnerability into a moral and political strength rooted in justice, belonging, and decolonial agency.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how migrants’ vulnerability to climate impacts – extreme rain and flooding – is constructed, mobilised, and contested in Marseille through an analysis of climate-health policy discourses and early research findings on migrants’ experiences of housing (im)mobility in the city.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how migrants’ vulnerability to climate impacts – extreme rain and flooding in particular – is constructed, mobilised, and contested in Marseille through an analysis of climate-health policy discourses and early research findings on migrants’ experiences of housing (im)mobility in the city. Structured in two parts, we first analysis how national, regional and municipal climate-related policies frame racialised migrants as inherently fragile and often disposable, in ways that echo broader vulnerability discourses of “at-risk” groups and spaces. Such framings typically detach vulnerability from the long colonial histories of racialisation, socio-economic and political neglect and spatial marginalisation that have shaped migrants lives’ – and their housing trajectories in particular. We will explore how climate and flooding policy discourses in particular participate in the reproduction of racialised vulnerabilisation and discrimination, which includes the spatial sorting of migrants into precarious, degraded housing and urban spaces.

We then complicate such narratives of vulnerability and disposability by turning to migrants’ everyday experiences and practices of housing precarity and (im)mobility. Drawing on interviews and photovoice workshops with migrants, we discuss how forms of resistance emerge through collective claims to home and urban spaces, informal solidarities, and everyday practices of survival. These practices can unsettle imaginaries of inevitability regarding migrant (im)mobility and (un)inhabitability. We show how migrants’ practices of home-making have the potentital to open alternative epistemologies of resistance and unsettle hierarchies of (im)mobility in the context of increasing climate change impacts, thereby contributing to critical political ecology debates on climate justice.