Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

William Solecki, Hunter College, City University of New York

; ,

Description:

A deep problem is brewing in how climate resilience is practiced. According to global climate discourse, climate resilience in practice should create “pathways” that connect climate adaptation and mitigation to sustainable development (Denton 2014). While climate-resilient development pathways are a major policy initiative as evidenced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) proceedings, very little is known about what climate-resilient development means, resulting in much debate and contestation over its elements and structure (Sherman et al. 2016; Thomas et al. 2021; Robinson et al. 2021). Based on this conflict, this session seeks to explore what the lack of definition implies about our capacity to intertwine climate adaptation with development imperatives?

Critical adaptation scholars are attempting to build theories, frameworks and methods that focus on defining the already-existing dynamic processes of climate-resilient pathways (discourses, practices and political economies) (Ojha et al. 2020; Nightingale et al. 2020) to understand the contradictions between development priorities and climate risk management. From this perspective, it is seen that climate-resilient pathways themselves, while vaguely defined in policy circles, are able to create political, social and economic transformations in the name of climate change but are fundamentally affecting the management and governance of development (Webber 2016).

Specifically, this field has observed that using climate adaptation as a way to re-structure development processes is illustrating the political ways in which climate resilience theory and practice is prioritizing technical-economic solutions over underlying vulnerabilities that affect human capacities to respond to climate and weather-related disaster (Manuel-Navarrete and Pelling 2015; Eriksen et al. 2021; Schipper et al. 2021). For instance, this includes restructuring local governments to accommodate for private financing (Bigger and Webber 2021), governments shifting from a public welfare to a climate change agenda to attract climate financing (Klepp and Chavez-Rodriguez 2018), and extending urban climate governance to include participation from multinational institutions, actors and financing ( Bulkeley and Betsill 2013; Webber et al. 2020). In turn, these inquiries have profound implications for explaining why the present elements and structure of climate-resilient pathways is inadvertently producing differentiated outcomes for vulnerability in the Global South as well as the Global North.

This paper session invites empirical and theoretical investigations that explore how climate-resilient pathways are altering the governance and management of development and define the implications of these transformations for vulnerability. All regional focuses are welcome. Papers can consider, but are not limited to, critical geographic perspectives on the following topics:

• The politics of climate adaptation
• Disaster risk reduction, development and resilience
• Climate financing and socio-economic restructuring
• Discourses, policies and practices of climate governance
• Political economies of climate vulnerability and/or climate resilient development
• Climate-proofing and mainstreaming climate change considerations for infrastructure and investments
References

Bigger, P., & Webber, S. (2021). Green structural adjustment in the World Bank’s resilient city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(1), 36-51.

Bulkeley, H., & Betsill, M. M. (2013). Revisiting the urban politics of climate change. Environmental politics, 22(1), 136-154.

Denton, F., T.J. Wilbanks, A.C. Abeysinghe, I. Burton, Q. Gao, M.C. Lemos, T. Masui, K.L. O’Brien, and K. Warner, 2014: Climate-resilient pathways: adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B.,V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken, K.J. Mach, M.D. Mastrandrea, T.E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K.L. Ebi, Y.O. Estrada, R.C. Genova, B. Girma, E.S. Kissel, A.N. Levy, S. MacCracken, P.R. Mastrandrea, and L.L. White (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, pp. 1101-1131.

Eriksen, S., Schipper, E. L. F., Scoville-Simonds, M., Vincent, K., Adam, H. N., Brooks, N., ... West, J. J. (2021). Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance? World Development, 141, 105383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105383

Klepp, S., & Chavez-Rodriguez, L. (Eds.). (2018). A critical approach to climate change adaptation: Discourses, policies and practices. Routledge.

Manuel-Navarrete, D., & Pelling, M. (2015). Subjectivity and the politics of transformation in response to development and environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 35, 558-569.

Nightingale, A. J., Eriksen, S., Taylor, M., Forsyth, T., Pelling, M., Newsham, A., ... & Whitfield, S. (2020). Beyond Technical Fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement. Climate and Development, 12(4), 343-352.

Ojha, H., Regmi, U., Shrestha, K. K., Paudel, N. S., Amatya, S. M., Zwi, A. B., ... Banjade, M. R. (2020). Improving science-policy interface: Lessons from the policy lab methodology in Nepal’s community forest governance. Forest Policy and Economics, 114(November 2019), 101997. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.101997

Robinson, S. A., Carlson, D. A., Messer, A., Maunus, L., Bouton, E., & Roberts, J. T. (2021). Climate compatible development in practice. Development in Practice, 1-11.
Schipper, E. L. F., Tanner, T., Dube, O. P., Adams, K. M., & Huq, S. (2020). The debate: Is global development adapting to climate change?. World Development Perspectives, 18, 100205.

Sherman, M., Berrang‐Ford, L., Lwasa, S., Ford, J., Namanya, D. B., Llanos‐Cuentas, A., ... & IHACC Research Team. (2016). Drawing the line between adaptation and development: a systematic literature review of planned adaptation in developing countries. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(5), 707-726.

Thomas, A., Theokritoff, E., Lesnikowski, A., Reckien, D., Jagannathan, K., Cremades, R., ... & Bowen, K. (2021). Global evidence of constraints and limits to human adaptation. Regional Environmental Change, 21(3), 1-15.

Webber, S. (2016). Climate change adaptation as a growing development priority: Towards critical adaptation scholarship. Geography Compass, 10(10), 401-413.

Webber, S., Leitner, H., & Sheppard, E. (2020). Wheeling out urban resilience: Philanthrocapitalism, marketization, and local practice. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(2), 343-363.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda