Format/Structure

The panel includes brief moderator remarks, up to 5 presentations (15 min each), followed by Q&A. Proposals may be in Spanish or English.

Long Abstract

This panel critically examines climate action as a global political project shaped by colonial legacies and uneven power relations. Standardized solutions—like climate-smart agriculture, nature-based solutions, and carbon markets—are often framed as urgent and apolitical, yet they tend to depoliticize the structural causes of climate change (Eriksen et al., 2015), relying on market-based fixes. These strategies carry Western imaginaries and assumptions, backed by international aid and scientific authority (Amo-Agyemang, 2021). As Sultana (2022) argues, climate action must confront the colonial, capitalist, and geopolitical logics embedded in global governance, which cause both epistemic violence and material harm. The panel explores the frictions and translations that arise as global strategies encounter diverse local realities, where situated knowledge, political ecologies, and sociohistorical trajectories reshape or resist them.

We draw on critical geography and political ecology to explore how global adaptation and mitigation strategies are reinterpreted, resisted, or reimagined in local contexts. How do communities, institutions, and territories respond to externally imposed interventions? What role do Global South states play in mediating or enforcing them? What alternatives emerge?

We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that address topics such as:

• The depoliticization of climate action and its effects.

• Vernacular and counter-hegemonic adaptation practices.

• Epistemological, material disputes and power struggles over climate strategies

• Intersectional and decolonial approaches to climate justice.

Please submit your title and abstract on the POLLEN conference website by december 5th 2025. Please contact Denise Misleh (dnmisleh@uc.cl) or Paulina Rodríguez (parodriguez6@uc.cl) with any questions.

References

Amo-Agyemang, C. (2021). Decolonising the discourse on resilience. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies-Multi-, Inter-and Transdisciplinarity, 16(1), 4-30.

Eriksen, S. et al (2015). Reframing adaptation: The political nature of climate change adaptation. Global environmental change, 35, 523-533.

Sultana, R. (2022) The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality, Political Geograpghy, 99 (1-16).

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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