Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.     

Energy Colonialism and the Role of the Global in Local Responses to New Energy Infrastructures in the UK: A Critical and Exploratory Empirical Analysis

Governments, namely in the global North, are fostering the deployment of large‐scale low carbon and associated energy infrastructures (EIs), such as power lines, to mitigate climate change. However, when infrastructures are to be deployed, opposition is often found. Environmental justice—involving issues of distributive and procedural justice and recognition—and associated inter‐group relations, has been identified as a key aspect for local opposition. However, research has rarely examined local perceptions of environmental justice and associated practices, such as energy colonialism, within a global perspective. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we examine if and how different‐level intergroup relations and collective narratives shape people's social‐psychological and geographical imaginaries and responses to EIs. Focus groups were conducted with community members affected by proposals to construct high‐voltage power lines in the UK. Analyses suggest that narratives around England's colonial history—within Britain and beyond Britain—shape responses to EIs.     

Belonging to the nation: Negotiating narratives of national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand

One of the most important yet complex contemporary political projects of belonging relate to rapidly diversifying societies. While prior research has tended to focus on how young people work to fit into the nation, this study sought to examine the processes by which ethnic minority young people (re)produced, reimagined and challenged narratives of national belonging. Underpinned by feminist theoretical understandings of citizenship and everyday nation, the study examined how young people (n = 180) attending four superdiverse high schools in Aotearoa New Zealand deliberated and negotiated the parameters of who belonged to the nation. The use of a qualitative participatory strategy – self-directed peer focus groups – opened up opportunities for young people to debate and contest complex ideas about belonging and national identity. Ethnic minority participants expressed widespread dissatisfaction with traditional narrow, monocultural narratives of national identity and drew on illustrations from their own everyday encounters with diverse others to offer more inclusive alternatives. Many employed affective notions of national belonging that centred on ‘feeling’ like, or choosing to be a ‘Kiwi’, rather than being chosen. Their deliberations and dialogue demonstrated agentic ways in which ethnic minority young people were ‘rewriting’ the narratives of national belonging to ensure that they and their peers were located as legitimate citizens of the nation, and in doing so, revealed the formation of their citizenship subjectivities.     

Concerning values: what underlies public polarisation about climate change?

Climate change is a partisan issue, with increasingly politically polarised responses, particularly in Anglophone countries. While politics clearly have a role in determining attitudes to climate science and policy, understanding the human values that underlie attitudes offers advantages over a focus on political differences. This study examines public concern about climate change in Hobart, the state capital of Tasmania, Australia. Hobart is a microcosm of polarisation about environmental issues due to its long history of conflict over natural resource use. Using a survey of 522 citizens of Hobart, the research examines the values underlying concern and unconcern about climate change. Applying an innovative analysis of human values to this area of research, I have found that, in the Tasmanian context, the unconcerned may be categorised into two groups with opposing values: people who prioritise national security, social order, and tradition; and people who value freedom of choice and the ability to make their own decisions. High levels of climate change concern are associated strongly with care for nature, suggesting that climate change is seen primarily as a threat to the environment, rather than to humanity. In this article, I argue that understanding the values underlying divergent interpretations of the threat of climate change is essential to resolving deadlock in political discourse. The work draws lessons for re‐engaging the unconcerned in inclusive conversations about climate change through narratives addressing a broader range of values.     

Narratives and counter-narratives of climate change: North Atlantic glaciology and meteorology,c.1930–1955

This paper seeks to uncover narratives of climate change shaped within two distinct but related research communities in glaciology and meteorology, both institutionally located at the Stockholm Högskola, later Stockholm University, and with widespread collaborative networks in the Nordic countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During the 1930s, Stockholm glaciology under Hans W:son Ahlmann provided an early theory of ‘polar warming’, based on solid field data from the North Atlantic and Arctic realm, but remained resistant to ideas of human climate forcing and thus lost a lot of its emerging policy influence. Stockholm meteorology under Carl-Gustaf Rossby followed a different trajectory. Based on geophysical theory and computer science experimentation funded by military sources on both sides of the Atlantic, the Rossby school established an early institutional acceptance of greenhouse explanations of climate change with strong links to policy. This account of divergent research agendas, differential extra-scientific conditions, and contradictory representations of the direction and causes of climate change should caution against viewing the history of climate science and policy as a cumulative affair based on ever more precise and better knowledge. The narratives presented here highlight, on the contrary, the importance of broad science politics as well as local and disciplinary methods, traditions, and institutional trajectories in shaping attitudes among scientists to climate change.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Climate change resilience in the Canadian Arctic: The need for collaboration in the face of a changing landscape

Human-induced changes to global climate have become increasingly difficult to ignore in recent years. As the frequency and severity of extreme weather events increases, the impacts on both natural and human systems are becoming difficult to manage with the current policies. In Canada, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change is the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at a rate two to three times that of the global average. Warmer seasonal temperatures have led to melting permafrost and increased variability in sea ice conditions, which has contributed to a rise in coastal erosion. The ongoing resilience of Arctic communities will depend heavily on their ability to implement successful long-term adaptation policies. The development and implementation of any action on climate change adaptation should involve collaboration with local stakeholders in order to reflect the views and experience of those living in the Arctic.     

Costs and benefits of environmental change: tourism industry's responses in Arctic Finland

ABSTRACT

Recent research has focused on the impacts of environmental change to tourism. In particular, the perceived costs of climate change have been increasingly studied. However, the relationship between costs and benefits resulting from the changing environmental conditions for the industry has been less examined. This paper identifies the locally observed changes in the natural and socio-economic environments and aims to analyse the financial costs and benefits to tourism businesses in two tourism-dependent communities in northern Finland. The specific focus is on adaptation and adaptive management in a tourist destination scale. Adaption is understood as an investment creating not only implementation costs, but potentially also benefits for tourism operations. Research materials were collected among tourism and tourism-related businesses through 41 semi-structured thematic interviews. Results indicate that the evaluated benefits of environmental change seem to exceed those of costs. This conforms to the on-going discourse of climate change–tourism relations associated with the Arctic region where both awareness and vulnerability to change are considered relatively high but the level of responses, i.e. adaptation, low. These results can help to further identify the most vulnerable sectors in tourism and assist entrepreneurs preparing for environmental and climate change. However, the paper concludes that while global environmental change, with specific adaptive management strategies, may create local short-term direct benefits for the industry, a long-term sustainability of tourism in the Arctic calls for mitigation responses to climate change.     

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.     

Performative citizenship and the politics of scale: Local,national and global citizenships in Zimbabwe

This paper explores the interaction between different scales of governance and performative citizenship, understood as acts by citizens that claim new political rights and reshape the political arena. Performance allows citizens to creatively transform the meanings and functions of citizenship during struggles over rights. The paper focuses on a series of examples in Zimbabwe, which highlight the entanglement of different scales of citizenship and the ways that the acts of citizenship both challenge and sustain these relationships. This is examined through a framework that combines theories of performative citizenship with concepts from human geography that examine scales of governance. The argument draws out the implications of these dynamics in relation to conflicts over customary citizenship in rural Zimbabwe, the issue of dual citizenship among white Zimbabweans and the exercise of citizenship rights by non-Zimbabweans. It highlights both the ways in which citizens have harnessed the creative potential of acts of citizenship which address multiple scales, and the constraints that scalar hierarchies put on citizen action. The examples demonstrate that new forms of political rights can be produced across scales, but that opportunities for creative acts of citizenship are unevenly distributed due to these scalar hierarchies, which are produced by postcolonial legacies.     

Comparing Climate Change Policy Adoption and Its Extension across Areas of City Policymaking

Public policies increasingly address complex problems such as climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation that require forging connections across existing areas of policy activity. Despite the emerging prominence of these types of policymaking challenges, more research is needed to understand policy responses to them. In this paper, I use survey responses from 287 cities and a hurdle model to comparatively examine the factors that underlie the adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation as issues influencing city policymaking and their extension across areas of city policymaking. I find evidence that while social change, crisis, and conditions supporting nascent coalitions were associated with adoption, extension across areas of policymaking was associated with the city?s prevailing political economy as well as the resources for expanding communities of interest. In the process, I offer empirical evidence for existing similarities and differences in cities? considerations about climate change mitigation and adaptation; particularly that the number of policymaking areas influenced by mitigation was associated with financial factors while the number influenced by adaptation was associated with socioeconomic ones.     

From expectations to aspirations: State modernisation,urban policy,and the existential politics of welfare in the UK

The form and character of the British welfare state is undergoing another round of reform. Welfare modernisation now focuses on the creation of ‘aspirational citizens’ in deprived areas or communities, individuals, and groups who will ‘better’ themselves and become more like an imagined social ‘mainstream’. Old-fashioned policies that promoted expectations of improvement have been replaced by this focus on encouraging new forms of self-reliant, aspirational citizenship. This paper interrogates the nature of this discursive shift. It argues that an existential politics, built around notions of aspiration, is being rolled-out across the British welfare state and that this has significant material and political implications. It begins by critically assessing the terms aspiration and expectation. It then draws on recent urban and spatial policy agendas to empirically explore the nature of this shift and its wider effects on urban societies, economies, and environments before concluding with a discussion of possible future research directions and agendas.     

Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages: The Making of a New Global Citizenship

Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national provenance. They are producing “state‐like” effects that touch deeply on citizenship. Villagers are drawn into a shifting REDD+ assemblage and subject to new identifications as entrepreneurs and responsible environmental citizens, meant to look after a new global commons. We shift the discussion to deal seriously with questions of a “global” citizenship, not in its utopian sense, but by bringing into light the dark side of global citizenship already in practice in environmental governance. Forests and peoples are in practice made global—we must conceptualize the rights of this “global” citizenship     

Expert Policy in Juvenile Justice

Policy design and analysis is conducted primarily by professional experts who often use objectively-defined criteria in the selection of those eligible for a policy and objective measurements to evaluate the effectiveness of a program. Juvenile justice policies, such as Juvenile Intensive Probation Supervision (JIPS), often are developed by experts who aim at correcting individual problems of youths rather than identifying problems with the structures of our society. Policies such as JIPS do not encourage participation of the recipients or of the wider community. In essence, the experts are removing power from already powerless youths and citizens, and thus are placing it in the hands of a few who are viewed as knowing what is best for everyone. As such, policies developed by experts often do not encourage democracy and citizenship. This articles suggests how youths, their families, parents, and communities can and need to become empowered in order for justice and democracy to prevail.     

Climate change vulnerability and adaptation research focusing on the Inuit subsistence sector in Canada: Directions for future research

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of research into the human dimensions of climate change in the Arctic. Much of this work has examined impacts on subsistence hunting, fishing, and trapping among Canadian Inuit communities. This scholarship has developed a baseline understanding of vulnerability and adaptation, drawing upon interviews with community members and stakeholders to identify and characterize climatic risks and adaptive strategies. To further advance this baseline understanding, new methodologies are needed to complement existing research if we are to capture the dynamic nature of how climate change is experienced and responded to, and fully engage communities as equal partners. Longitudinal studies, community‐based monitoring, and targeted adaptation research offer significant promise to advance understanding. These methodologies provide a strong basis for developing meaningful partnerships with communities, the co‐production of knowledge, and empowerment for adaptation: essential components of community‐based participatory research.     

Narrative policy images: Intersecting narrative & attention in presidential stories about the environment

Drawing on ideas about how narratives focus attention, this paper develops a “narrative policy image” using the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Narrative Policy Framework explanations of the policy process. The concept of a narrative policy image is applied to test partisan expectations about presidential environmental policy stories in State of the Union Addresses over 73 years. This research finds that Democratic stories focus on problems like climate change and victims and Republican stories emphasize solutions like new programs and upholding the status quo. These trends point to potential story types and suggest a narrative policy image, including both narrative components and valence, may be a useful concept for understanding narrative attention in macropolitics.     

Climates of control: Violent adaptation and climate change in the Philippines

This paper considers the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance and advocacy by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on heterogenous state responses to the 2018–2019 El Niño drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a violent vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: exhorting the devastating reality of climate change; denigrating multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; subverting indigenous peoples' land rights; and fostering the extrajudicial assassination of activists. Though Duterte's wider climate change policies are often viewed as a strategic distraction or the isolated product of an erratic populist, I argue that these recent responses to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial and nationalist sensibilities to confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of illiberal adaptation politics across Philippine history and the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge both universalist Western political rationalities and new directions in climate justice movement calling for ontological inclusivity. I highlight the need for a closer examination of the origins, practices and implications of violent adaptions.     

PRACTICING THE CULTURAL GREEN ECONOMY: WHERE NOW FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIAL SCIENCE?

Debates concerning the development of the green economy necessarily focus on “upstream” issues that underpin the re‐structuring of national and regional economies through the lenses of financial, institutional and regulatory change. However, the growing interest in the cultural green economy requires a re‐scaling of debates surrounding the links that occur in complex socio‐technical systems, notably between individual consumers, social units and the architectures of the developing green economy. This necessitates a research and policy agenda that is attentive to both the complexities of such interactions (between structures, processes and practices) and the imperative to foster change in practices within wider society. This article explores the ways in which environmental social scientists have examined and evidenced these issues, arguing that two major barriers still exist for creating adequate understandings and opportunities for change. First, the overt focus on the individual consumer as a unit of measurement and political attention has stifled debate concerning the ways in which environmentally related social practices have developed in association with wider economic contexts. In this way, environmental social scientists have often failed to make the connections between individuals, practices and the economic system. Second, in adopting a largely individualistic perspective, environmental social scientists have tended to focus their attention on incrementalist and narrowly defined views of what ecological citizenship might look like and constitute in the green economy. The article therefore argues that environmental social scientists need to constructively engage in a new inter‐disciplinary dialogue about the role, purpose and ethics of citizen participation in developing and sustaining the green economy in an age of climate change and potential resource scarcity.     

“Why would they care?”: Youth,resource extraction,and climate change in northern British Columbia,Canada

Discussion about local decision making tends to overlook rural and remote youth engagement. Resource extractive industries are, however, fixtures in many rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in settler colonial British Columbia, Canada. These industries shape youths' perceived options for social and economic ventures when they are looking towards their futures. By engaging literature on climate change, settler colonialism, and critical Indigenous studies, and drawing on empirics from workshops conducted with youth from northern British Columbia, this paper explores how rural and remote northern and Indigenous youth engagement and perspectives can transform discussions on climate change and resource extraction. The paper documents how rural and northern youth have been engaged in environmental decision making, particularly in light of resource extraction. The paper also suggests that environmental decision making has at times been extractive itself. The paper concludes that when engaged meaningfully, youth desire to work collectively against social and environmental injustices.