In part driven by characterizations of the climate crisis, there has been a groundswell in recasting climate change in terms of climate security. This research extends a political ecology lens on the proliferation of climate security by examining its effects on the framing and enactment of policies and practices. Our approach draws from a literature review and expert interviews to explore how climate security interacts with a series of processes, including i) new forms of global-local interactions; ii) effects on forms of tenure and access iii) changing state relations iv) distribution of costs and benefits v) stakeholder engagement, and vi) conflict resolution. Our findings show that the understandings of climate security vary considerably among climate change actors but share particular trends in that they lead to the obfuscation of issues related to power dynamics among actors. Specifically, climate security shifts potential opportunities for understanding imbalances of power, tilting them towards policies and practices that privilege existing powerful actors at the expense of the marginalized. In many ways, climate security has become a floating signifier for further entrenchment of neocolonial relations and practices. Therefore, while climate security initiatives continue to attract the attention of major global players to address a pressing global challenge, we highlight the particular blindspots that they create.

Individual Presentation Submission

This paper explores the varying ways in which the Doma people of the Zambezi Valley in Zimbabwe give meaning to climate change discourses on adaptation and mitigation. Doma people are regarded as one of the indigenous groups of Zimbabwe together with the San. Given the continued marginalisation of such community and the unique characteristics of these people, the study was motivated to move away from the popular conception that there is a linear and correct way of interpreting and understanding climate change as a scientific discourse and interrogated the meaning of climate change to such indigenous populations. The study is based on the findings of a focused ethnographic work undertaken during the build-up to COP 26 in Glasgow. It contextualizes climate change in the historical, environmental and socio-political dimensions of the Doma interpretive horizons. In addition, it put forward the argument that local discourses and meanings attached to climate change by the indigenous peoples are not barriers in the global pursuit of meeting some of the targets in the Paris Agreement such as goals on mitigation and adaptation. Local discourses might appear to contradict global discourses and policy goals but they reveal crucial insights about local priorities, values and agency. It must be therefore noted that the rejection of global discourses by these people should not be conceived as a form of ignorance, but rather they should be considered as an act of cultural translation and resistance.

Individual Presentation Submission

This paper broadens the debate on the role of environmental conservation in the Anthropocene by putting three strands of thought into discussion. The first is that of convivial conservation and its insistence that environmental conservation be pursued in the awareness of a dialectical integration between nature and culture (Buscher and Fletcher 2020). The second is Malcom Ferdinand’s decolonial ecology and his reparative gesture of worlding in view of what he describes as modernity’s racial and environmental double fracture (Ferdinand 2022). The third is my own related conceptualization of racial enviro-histories as tripartite, having emerged from the historical co-constitution of nature, labor and conceptions of race in the Caribbean (Collins, 2021). While Buscher and Fletcher’s work convincingly takes the environmental conservation movement to task for failing to address staggering biodiversity loss and accelerating climate change, its replacement of ‘Anthropos’ with ‘Capital’ does not go far enough in deconstructing the generalized figure of humanity deemed responsible for these events. Ferdinand proceeds by highlighting the formative role of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism in the ecological crisis. Yet, he does not engage with some work within political ecology that has thus far integrated concerns for racial and colonial injustice into their rubric. This paper argues that a combination of these approaches and a conceptual focus on atmospheres has the potential to act as a suturing, commoning space for reimagining and decolonizing conservation in the Anthropocene.

Individual Presentation Submission

MEMORIES OF AIR

In my presentation, I suggest that we are currently witnessing a mutation, which disrupts the mythical imaginary that had confined viruses, climate change, and atmospheric turbulences to an immutable, celestial background. Western philosophy has based its perpetuation on ideas that have been built on an exploitable ground, endlessly manipulated, dissociated from a sky that has become increasingly uncertain and threatening, increasingly distant. The conclusions presented in this short presentation move in opposite direction to this disastrous separation, as I argue that the repression of this traumatic experience, is the cause of the perturbation that haunts our time. Disorientation pervades philosophy when the entire imaginary to which it had anchored its power to change the world seems to dissolve in the air; but precisely for this reason, philosophy must accept inhabiting the fluctuating disorientation of its own time, populated by intermittent and uncertain opportunities of experiencing differently the past and the future—to encounter different relationships with the times that change.

Keywords: ecology; climate change; philosophy.

Individual Presentation Submission

ADAPTATION TO COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES IN GHANA'S VOLTA RIVER DELTA: POST-CONSTRUCTIVIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY PERSPECTIVES

Representing a geomorphologically highly active ecosystem, Ghana’s Volta River Delta struggles since several decades with continuously diminishing land resources. This is due to persistent coastal erosion and inundation on a densely populated but narrow sand spit east of the Volta estuary that is located between the Atlantic Ocean and Keta Lagoon. My paper draws on perspectives from post-constructivist political ecology – going along with a re-appreciation of matter after the material turn – to scrutinize how adaptation to environmental changes materializes unequally at particular locations within the delta. Referring to ethnographic and other qualitative data from field visits, the paper unveils unique naturecultural assemblages that lead in one site to state-led resettlement of people into villages on reclaimed land that is protected by sea defense structures, but in another site to autonomous practices of ‘living with’ environmental changes without much governmental interference. This contribution in addition uses post-colonial thinking to demonstrate the crucial role of dichotomous valuations of knowledge – with (global) ‘scientific’ knowledge surpassing (local) ‘indigenous’ or ‘practical‘ knowledge – for these adaptation outcomes. Trying to overcome the dialectic between nature and culture, adaptation takes shape as permanently reshuffling assemblages of more-than-human sociomaterial practices. These entail as multispecies agents a.o. the dammed Volta River, flows of sand, tidal and wave dynamics, but also (inter-)national climate change adaptation discourses dominated by technocratic and managerial science-based interventions, historical knowledge of the native Anlo-Ewe clans, or traditional worldviews and belief systems – altogether renegotiating the symbolic, material and spatial dimensions of land and ocean.

KEYWORDS: adaptation, environmental change, post-constructivist political ecology