Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how World Bank climate assessments and municipal information systems in Karachi construct informal settlements as environmental risks, enabling green-transition projects that legitimize eviction under the guise of climate adaptation.

Presentation long abstract

As climate adaptation and green transition agendas accelerate across the Global South, environmental information systems, like risk maps and resilience diagnostics, are mobilized to justify large-scale urban interventions. These information regimes actively participate in producing informal settlements as hazardous, illegible, and ultimately displaceable. This paper places displacement as a systematic effect of how environmental knowledge is generated, circulated, and operationalized across scales.

Using Karachi as the primary empirical site, it traces the circulation of environmental information through three interconnected arenas. First, it examines how the World Bank, a key development actor in Pakistan’s urban and climate sectors, constructs narratives of environmental vulnerability and resilience in its climate adaptation assessments and city development frameworks. These documents frame informality as both cause and consequence of ecological degradation, establishing a discursive logic in which “green growth” requires spatial reordering.

Second, the paper analyzes how municipal authorities in Karachi reinterpret, simplify, and strategically deploy these World Bank frameworks. Tender documents and implementation guidelines reveal a bureaucratic politics of translation: broad categories such as “risk reduction,” “resilience upgrading,” and “environmental performance” are operationalized in ways that disproportionately target informal settlements, regardless of differentiated exposure or residents’ ecological practices.

Third, the paper shows how these translated information regimes materialize on the ground through flood-risk mapping around stormwater nullahs and anti-encroachment drives, recasting long-standing informal neighborhoods as obstacles to green infrastructure.

By foregrounding informality as a category produced through information practices, the paper demonstrates how technocratic environmental knowledge infrastructures entrench socio-spatial hierarchies.