Presentation short abstract

Sea Level Rise (SLR) is a growing concern in inter- and transnational fora. Dominant problematisations of SLR limit the solution space for adaptation to technocratic management and risk foreclosing alternative climate futures for coastal cities and regions.

Presentation long abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) is increasingly reframed as a global political problem, no longer confined to local adaptation needs or the existential struggles of atoll nations. Recent UN debates and the creation of the Ocean Rise & Coastal Resilience Coalition (ORCRC) mark the institutionalisation of SLR within global and transnational climate governance. This article asks how SLR is rendered governable as an object of global politics, and how this global problematisation reshapes the solution space for local adaptation efforts. Adopting a poststructuralist governmentality framework and focusing on the ORCRC, I trace the rationalities, visibilities, technologies of governing, and subject positions inherent to the emerging global governing of SLR. Through a globalised vision of (coastal) resilience, this governmentality privileges the rollout of transnational knowledge infrastructures, embeds adaptation in cost-benefit logics, and opens coastal cities for private investment through financial instruments. SLR is framed simultaneously as an existential threat and as a risk to the blue economy. Economistic calculations of viability normalise ‘managed retreat’ as inevitable and reframe vulnerabilities as a chance for transformation. The emerging SLR governmentality could discipline coastal cities and regions towards neoliberal adaptation pathways, reinforce colonial hierarchies of knowledge production and obscure alternative imaginaries of coastal futures.