From beneficiary to worker: Interrogating the hidden labor on adaptation's front lines

Keywords: climate justice, labor, development
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

The mainstreaming of climate change adaptation programming in global development assumes the availability of an extraordinary amount of free and cheap labor to transform environments and production systems. Yet work and labor are strikingly absent from adaptation project proposals, budgets, and plans, particularly in rural agrarian settings. We consider these expectations of free adaptation labor to be an overlooked climate injustice. In this paper, we first synthesize across a broad data set of adaptation projects financed by multilateral actors to illuminate characteristic discursive conventions and assumptions that obscure and devalue participants’ labor and time. These include, for instance, tropes of “community contribution”, “project ownership”, “labor surplus”, and the implied virtue of unremunerated work. We then draw on participant observation to provide a counter-reading of these discursive tropes, suggesting the extent to which adaptation programming has become a distinct and gendered labor regime in which participants exchange their limited time, labor, knowledge, attention, and flexibility for the highly uncertain possibility of gaining a modicum of “resilience” to climate and economic transformations. We suggest how adaptation labor relations could be reframed to make the work of adaptation more visible and valued, while simultaneously questioning the ability of a liberal politics of recognition and remuneration to achieve climate justice.