Format/Structure

We propose to convene a panel focused on political ecology of disasters and development, and invite papers to present as part of this panel.

Long Abstract

Disasters, whether natural (e.g. cyclones, floods), technological (e.g., dam failures, nuclear accidents), or anthropogenic (e.g., air pollution from agricultural burning or industrial emissions), have increasingly disrupted biophysical systems, critical infrastructure, and global supply chains. These disruptions, which are increasing in frequency, intensity, and geographic spread across the globe, threaten essential human provisioning systems such as food, water, and energy. This has led to growing awareness among critical scholars of environmental and ecological crises as a result of multiscaled convergences of capitalist development, climate change, and social inequalities. 

Paradoxically, dominant development trajectories have intensified rather than reduced disaster vulnerability, despite mitigation efforts (Beck 1992, Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 2020). While capitalist development has flattened the world, creating opportunities and economic growth, it has also intensified the exposure to natural hazards, producing challenges and precarity by reworking social-ecological relations. As disasters reveal these fragilities, states and international organizations have framed risk management as central to development agendas. In contrast, critical voices call for alternative values that foreground social-ecological wellbeing, justice, and  reciprocity over economic growth-oriented development models. Through the lens of World Ecology, we view disasters and development as forming multi-scaled interpenetrating relations. Understanding these dynamics requires not only conceptual innovation but also empirically grounded research. In this panel, we are particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold across spatial and temporal scales.

This panel engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue on how disasters are socially produced, represented, experienced and governed, by inviting contributions that apply a political ecology lens to analyse how multiscaled processes and relations of ecology, capitalism, and power produce differentiated impacts and experiences of disasters and development in situated places around the world. We are also interested in collaborating with political ecologists who are undertaking conceptually innovative and empirically rich research on disasters and development.

This Panel has 7 pending paper proposals.
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