Presentation short abstract

This presentation reports back into conversation the practical considerations of applying theoretical and methodological advancements from climate change adaptation and transformation literature, and spotlights the urgency of planning capable of partnering with, rather than controlling, unruliness.

Presentation long abstract

Planners are increasingly concerned with mitigating multi-hazard risks, including cascading and compounding climate risks. Simultaneously, progress has been made among climate adaptation scholars to clarify the limitations and opportunities of planning, in the technical assessment literature to grapple with stochastic risk and uncertainty, and among feminist political ecologists to elucidate and reframe what makes transformations effective. However, new reports of surpassed biophysical and indications of relational and governance tipping points present a new imperative for planners. The science, and scholarship, is clear: mitigation and adaptation alone are insufficient amidst new ecological extremes, warranting planning that takes transformation seriously. However, the enduring demarcation between planning spheres and consanguinity of prediction and control within planning practice spotlights the urgency of planning capable of partnering with unruliness rather than attempting to isolate and control it. The Oregon natural hazard mitigation plan risk assessment tool is a bold, hands-on attempt to bridge theory and practice amidst and despite uncertain regulatory landscapes. Redesigned as the basis of a FEMA hazard mitigation plan, the risk assessment tool is a localized attempt to apply theory to practice in a combined natural hazard and climate risk assessment planning process. I draw on my experience developing this tool as case study evidence towards my exploration of unruly dynamics within the practice of planning towards transformation, report back into conversation the challenges and opportunities of doing so, and engage unruliness within climate transformations literature towards a reimagination and reclamation of possible futures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper offers a critical historical review of hydropower extractivism in Namibia — from early colonial-era infrastructure plans, through the country’s postcolonial development ambitions, to the contested resurgence of the Popa Falls Hydropower Project.

Presentation long abstract

This paper offers a critical historical review of hydropower extractivism in Namibia — from early colonial-era infrastructure plans, through the country’s postcolonial development ambitions, to the contested resurgence of the Popa Falls Hydropower Project. By situating Namibian hydropower schemes within a broader political-ecological and extractivist lens, the study interrogates how colonial and external forces have shaped energy politics, resource control, and environmental imaginaries in Namibia.

The analysis begins with mid-20th century water and dam proposals under colonial or apartheid-era administrations, when water management and hydropower were framed in terms of state control, settler agriculture, and extractive modernization — often with little consideration for Indigenous livelihoods or regional ecologies.

The review then turns to more recent hydropower plans. In particular, it traces how external actors — including international consultancies, transnational water commissions, foreign investors — continue to influence the trajectory of hydropower and extractivism in Namibia. Against this background, the Popa Falls Hydropower Project emerges as more than a technical scheme: it becomes a flashpoint for competing visions of development, conservation, and sovereignty (Dentlinger 2004).

The history of hydropower extractivism in Namibia has also been unruly. The Popa Falls scheme provoked strong cross-border opposition from environmental NGOs, tourism stakeholders, and communities in both Namibia and Botswana who feared long-term damage to the Okavango wetlands (Dentlinger 2004).

By reconstructing this layered history, the paper argues that Namibia’s hydropower ambitions cannot be disentangled from colonial legacies, transnational political-economy, and contested socio-material relations.

Presentation short abstract

We examine how Norway’s hydropower participation in Nordic frequency control markets redistributes technical, financial, and ecological risks. Using interviews, market analysis, and novel acoustic analysis, we show how balancing practices shift risks across infrastructures, places, and communities.

Presentation long abstract

Hydropower in Norway is often narrated as stability: reservoirs as batteries, waterfalls as kinetic promise. Yet when the grid’s pulse slips from 50 Hz, stability depends on a nested market ecology: day-ahead, intraday, and balancing, whose “risk work” redistributes exposure across watersheds, bidding zones, and institutions. We examine the spatial configurations of risk in Norway’s participation in frequency control markets, tracing how risks are produced and lived across communities, infrastructures, and places. We ask whether practices framed as risk mitigation in fact reconfigure and redistribute risks, shifting them across scales, geographies, and experiences. Sound is both method and metaphor: the steady hum of turbines, the hiss of inflow and spillways, the abrupt alarms of operational disturbance, and the everyday acoustics of river communities. Listening becomes a way to attend to the relational boundaries through which risks are defined, translated, and experienced. Through interviews with hydropower operators, grid actors, municipal owners, and Nordic frequency balancing market practitioners, paired with market analysis, acoustic measurement and field recordings, we trace how balancing actions and settlement routines re-locate technical, financial, and ecological risks. We argue that contemporary market coupling and Nordic settlement centralization perform risk shifting rather than risk mitigation: from transmission system operational risk toward balance operators via imbalance pricing and collateral and from generators toward local ecologies through redispatch and curtailment. Listening - analytical and situated - opens an entry to these translations, surfacing boundaries that otherwise remain invisible and inaudible yielding a novel embodied methodology for tracking uncertainties.

Presentation short abstract

Anchoring the narrative in a climate-vulnerable, contested coastal road project and an indeterminate logistical future, this paper articulates unruliness as a generative spatio-temporal rhythm fostered as much by the dissenting voices of coastal communities as by the dynamic littoral materialities.

Presentation long abstract

In 2021 when a catastrophic tropical cyclone wreaked havoc on coastal Bengal, the storm and tidal surges damaged several material infrastructures including parts of an under-construction coastal road project popularly known as the Marine Drive ('Saikat Sarani' in local language). This was, however, not the first setback the project had encountered; the unruly, amphibious wetscape of the coast has repeatedly disrupted the infrastructural effort, all the more so against the contemporary backdrop of increasing frequency of cyclones and tidal floods affecting the region. Furthermore, the project has faced resistance from certain segments of coastal communities and small-scale fishers' collectives who have voiced their opposition on the ground that the infrastructural project allegedly encroaches on some of their individually-owned land as well as shared communal spaces, including collectively-used fish-drying grounds along the shoreline. The Marine Drive, a flagship project of the state government, is an integral component of the larger infrastructural vision of transforming the littoral edges into frontiers for logistical expansion, seamless connectivity, and economic prosperity. Foregrounding frictions, resistance, and uncertainties that counteract the dominant, totalizing storyline of a seemingly smooth logistical expansion, this paper conceptualizes unruliness as generative spatio-temporal rhythms fostered as much by the dissenting voices of coastal communities as by the geophysical limits that the dynamic materialities of the amphibious coastal ecotones engender - both of which expose the fragile foundations of the logistical promise entrenched in the marine drive project and the indeterminacy of logistical future that it seeks to materialize in a climate-changed world.

Presentation short abstract

Models make uncertainty computable, but social life holds unruly uncertainties that resist quantification. This wound in the algorithm reveals what models erase relations, refusals, and histories. We call for modeling that stays partial, accountable, and open to the unmodeled.

Presentation long abstract

Amid accelerating climate turbulence, mathematical models have become central instruments for decision-making. Across domains such as stochastic optimization, chaos theory, and machine learning, uncertainty is framed as a computable artifact: a sensitivity parameter, a probability distribution, a scenario waiting to be enumerated. We take uncertainty as an entry point not simply to improve modeling, but to interrogate the ontological assumptions through which models craft the worlds they claim to represent. There is, we argue, a wound in the algorithm: an opening that exposes the limits of approaches premised on a world that is fully knowable, quantifiable, and optimizable. Yet many uncertainties encountered in environmental and political life cannot, and should not, be forced into numerical containers. Unruliness names this dimension of uncertainty that resists translation: political refusal, spiritual causality, collective memory, land-as-kin, trauma, sovereignty, story. These are not epistemic gaps awaiting better data; they are forms of relation that do not belong to the quantitative. When models discipline uncertainty by rendering only computable forms legible, they silence alternative worldviews, erase relational knowledge, and reproduce political hierarchies under the guise of mathematical rigor. Drawing on case studies from climate adaptation, energy governance, and risk assessment, we show how modeling frameworks filter out the very uncertainties rooted in politics, history, and relational life. In response, we propose frictional modeling: an approach that keeps models wounded, partial, and accountable, preserves opacity, and holds space for relational and political sovereignties that live in the unmodeled.

Presentation short abstract

New low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across Africa, trafficking anew colonial and capitalist relations. This paper theorizes creative reworkings of emergent energy infrastructures in rural Zambia as decolonial technopolitics, a de-linking of electrified life from colonial capitalism.

Presentation long abstract

Amid escalating climate risks and growing demands to electrify rural geographies, new low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across Africa, yet energy transition initiatives often reproduce rather than unsettle extractivist, exclusionary and colonial logics. As electrification remains largely driven by international capital in conjunction with its political membrane, the state, new forms of dependency, dispossession, co-optation arise, and communities resisting or otherwise subverting the grids of electrified capitalism are mostly rendered technocratic problems to be “managed”. Drawing on ethnographic research in communities undergoing electrification in rural Zambia – either through mini-grid installations or the extension of the national grid, both with surreptitious ties to international capital – this paper takes refusals, reworkings, and disruptions of emergent energy infrastructures as ontological stances to be taken seriously as pivots for political prefiguration and counter-theorization. We build on – and fuse – Science and Technology Studies (STS), political ecology and political economy to rethink energy infrastructures as sociomaterial alloys that emerge from a process of assembling recalcitrant human and non-human actors to constitute, embody, and enact particular political orders. As such, social inequalities are both stabilized and destabilized as electric power systems gain material solidity, gather dust, or decay. Resistance works through (not from outside) these ultimately unstable infrastructural assemblages, reworking energy transition projects into highly dynamic spaces of technopolitical contestation. From these contestations, we move towards a decolonial technopolitics – practices of de-linking electrified life from colonial-capitalist relations – as a counter-conjecture to the anti-political apparatus currently pushing rural electrification in Southern Africa.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how ‘unruly’ survivors challenge dominant framings of urgency in climate discourse. Urgency is often presumed in disaster responses—swift action appears inevitable. Yet, such narratives rarely question whose interests are prioritised and what rhetorics underpin rapid responses.

Presentation long abstract

This paper draws attention to a less explored, temporal aspect of climate-induced disasters: how ‘unruly’ survivors of disasters challenge dominant framings of urgency in climate discourse. On 30 July 2024, a hillock in the Western Ghats of Kerala, India, broke off, triggering a landslide that claimed 400 lives. The disaster stemmed from a complex interaction of unchecked human settlement, climate change and historical interventions in a fragile ecology. In response, the Kerala government announced multi-million-rupee townships as the resettlement plan, declaring the landslide zone uninhabitable. Most of the survivors, who were settler tea-plantation workers, accepted the plan. However, Adivasi families that were also affected refused to become beneficiaries of the plan. These unruly survivors defied state agents warning them of losing out and highlighted what relocation would cost them – forest rights, access to minor forest products, sacred groves and ancestral graves. Their refusal slowed down state action and served as a protest against state efforts to move Adivasis outside forests, earlier on conservation pretexts and now in the name of climate change. Drawing on historically informed ethnography, this paper brings out how urgency is often presumed in climate disaster responses—swift action is seen as both necessary and inevitable. Yet, such narratives rarely interrogate whose interests are prioritised and what justificatory rhetorics underpin these rapid responses. The paper thereby demonstrates how climate urgency narratives admit affects selectively—in the Kerala case, foregrounding settler grief, loss, worry and aspiration, while marginalising Adivasi concerns rooted in displacement, cultural erasure, and historical injustice.

Presentation short abstract

As power struggles unfold over access to ‘critical minerals’, the consensus among experts and policy makers is that due diligence and disclosure on environmental and social 'risks’ in supply chains will address socioecological harms. I ground truth their assumptions in Zambian manganese mines.

Presentation long abstract

Toxic dust is the unruly consequence of extraction that reminds us how leaky both ‘nature’ and the taxonomic systems that support extractivism are. While the obedient matter of ore sits in orderly piles, dust defies capture and control. Dust hitches rides on the open trucks driving from mine to market but gets distracted and goes off to visit the soil, water and lungs on the way. It transgresses the boundaries between ground and air, inside and outside, resource and threat. Dusty indiscretion reminds us that our bodies and territories aren’t as separate and self-contained as they seem.

I present multi-sited research linking European supply chain transparency practices with insights from field work on Zambian manganese mining. By attending to (1) dispossession, (2) ecological degradation, and (3) commodity export dependence, I demonstrate that transparency is an arena for power struggles at multiple scales, characterized by socially constructed ignorance and a contingent web of pressures that stabilizes extractive relations while rendering them invisible. I argue that transparency configured through an extractive gaze produces de-humanized risk-subjects, proliferates toxic body-territories and generates a growing class of landless people who are surplus to capitalist labor requirements in the age of automation. Herein lies the potential for rupture. The premise of my work is that extractive relations are inherently unstable and identifying the mechanisms that (temporarily) stabilize them is crucial for articulating emancipatory demands.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how Rio de Janeiro's biopolitical disaster risk governance produces "unruly precarity" in favelas. It argues that the failure of state anticipation creates emancipatory spaces, as residents mobilise resistance through their shared vulnerability.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the biopolitical governance of disaster risk in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has produced a state of unruly precarity in favela communities. Following the 2010 landslides, city authorities adopted a "paradigm shift" in disaster response, leveraging urban resilience and risk technologies to justify mass removals. This approach, framed as a rational anticipation of future disasters, is revealed as a racialised technology of government that obscures a long history of state-led precarisation.

The paper argues that this risk-based governance constitutes a form of failed anticipation, not in its technical prediction of environmental events, but in its political refusal to acknowledge the historical and structural drivers of vulnerability. By characterising favelas as 'high-risk areas' through probabilistic calculations, the state attempts to manage a future threat but instead produces a condition of permanent transience and induced precarity. This refusal of the social and historical context to be contained by depoliticised risk models constitutes the core unruliness of the state's anticipatory project.

Crucially, the paper explores the emancipatory spaces that emerge from this unruliness. Drawing on a feminist and decolonial framework, the research highlights how favela dwellers resist displacement by mobilising their shared and produced vulnerability. This resistance is an unruly refusal of the state's biopolitical calculus, manifesting in epistemic, temporal, affective, and material forms of contestation. These acts of resistance demonstrate that the failure of state anticipation is precisely the moment where spaces for emancipatory change arise.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how new greening frontiers emerge when accelerated green investments meet local mobility, land claims, and fragmented authority in Northern Kenya. Here, green logics generate unruliness and reshape resource politics, revealing new spaces of contested authority and justice.

Presentation long abstract

Global climate and biodiversity crises have generated powerful anticipatory narratives portraying nature, land, and time as rapidly vanishing. These global green scarcity imaginaries drive accelerated conservation and renewable energy investments into local scales across African drylands that are now revalued as essential for planetary futures. For this reason, we see conservation and renewable energy not as separate domains but as interconnected elements of a moral project of greening that produces forms of territorialization, enclosure, and symbolic legitimacy for expanding green investments.

Yet, upon implementation in Northern Kenya’s drylands, these greening efforts, whether solar farms, expanding rhino sanctuaries, or carbon projects, encounter unruly socio-political landscapes as local actors reinterpret, resist, or appropriate these agendas. This paper examines how greening frontiers emerge when global crisis-driven anticipation meets local histories of mobility, land claims, and fragmented authority. These frontiers, imagined as empty, governable, or environmentally necessary, prove anything but: pastoralist livelihoods, customary tenure, elite patronage networks, and militarized state–conservancy entanglements complicate the neat logic of green development.

Rather than yielding smooth transitions, accelerated green interventions generate green conflicts that materialize as forms of slow and cumulative tension and violence. Such friction is tied to greening projects themselves along with whoever is driving the agenda and the vested interests involved.

By tracing the collision between global green agendas and local scale unruliness, the paper argues that the future-oriented logics of the green transition reshape resource politics and reveal new spaces where authority and justice are reimagined and contested within rapidly changing dryland frontiers.