Climates of Control: Populist nature as adaptation to climate change

Keywords: authoritarianism, populism, philippines, governance, water, El Niño, climate change
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

This paper confronts the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on responses to the 2018-2019 El Niño drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a nationalist vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: denigrating global and multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; threatening to renationalise water provision; and subverting indigenous peoples’ land rights. Though Duterte’s wider climate change policies are often viewed as the isolated product of an erratic eco-populist, I argue that recent authoritarian approaches to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial sensibilities with confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of adaptation politics across the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge Western political rationalities and ethical sensibilities of the climate justice movement built on universalist terms, in addition to highlighting the need for a more expansive conceptualisation of adaptation.