The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation

Livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development

Marcus Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134485963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book provides the first systematic critique of the concept of climate change adaptation within the field of international development. Drawing on a reworked political ecology framework, it argues that climate is not something 'out there' that we adapt to. Instead, it is part of the social and biophysical forces through which our lived environments are actively yet unevenly produced. From this original foundation, the book challenges us to rethink the concepts of climate change, vulnerability, resilience and adaptive capacity in transformed ways. With case studies drawn from Pakistan, India and Mongolia, it demonstrates concretely how climatic change emerges as a dynamic force in the ongoing transformation of contested rural landscapes. In crafting this synthesis, the book recalibrates the frameworks we use to envisage climatic change in the context of contemporary debates over development, livelihoods and poverty.

With its unique theoretical contribution and case study material, this book will appeal to researchers and students in environmental studies, sociology, geography, politics and development studies.

1
Climate change and the frontiers of political ecology

Since the advent of historical capitalism, virtually no part of the planet has remained untouched by humanity’s restless compulsion to transform nature. It is now more than a century and a half ago that Marx and Engels wrote effusively about humanity’s newly awakened productive powers that cleared “whole continents for cultivation” and simultaneously conjured “entire populations out of the ground” (Marx and Engels 1998). Their arguments reflected the degree to which humans had become prolific agents of environmental change on a world scale, therein anticipating what some authors now term ‘the anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Steffen 2003). This Promethean project of harnessing nature to anthropogenic designs appeared to be the realisation of modernity’s founding premise that humans could collectively create and enact their own future outside of determination by natural laws. Such ethos, however, held a dark underside. The pursuit of rationality, efficiency and accumulation on a global scale travelled hand-in-hand with the historical processes of enclosure, expropriation, domination and enslavement (Wolf 1982). Moreover, while the unleashing of humanity’s productive energies created a world of unparalleled – if desperately unequal – consumption, it also left a trail of resource depletion, land degradation, environmental pollution and species extinction (UNEP 2014). Attempting to mediate or reverse such contradictory forces has been the source of intense and bitter social struggles across the history of world capitalism (Gadgil and Guha 1993; Grove 1997; Martínez-Alier 2002).

Contemporary climate change, however, appears to pose a different order of questions. Whereas the use and abuse of nature noted above encountered notable biophysical constraints, these often appeared to be relatively localised and permeable limits to human designs. Within capitalism, as Marx noted, every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome and the ensuing history of capitalism is one of compulsive technological change, the opening of new resource frontiers and the repeated displacement of such ‘externalities’ onto the human and geographical margins of society (Marx 1973: 408; Moore 2010a; Barbier 2011). The idea of anthropogenic climate change, however, appears to level a much greater challenge to embedded modernist convictions and practices. Here, nature manifests itself not as a passive resource that strains and complains under human demands but as a dynamic historical agent with the potential to dramatically shape humanity’s future on a planetary scale. As David Clark provocatively notes, the current suspicion that humankind has turned the planet’s weather systems into a vast experiment has an ominous supplement: the recognition that drastic climatic shifts have experimented with human life across history in ways that have repeatedly put humans through desperate trials and hardships (2010: 32). On these grounds, by collectively releasing vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, humanity’s agency is conceived to have awoken a dangerous leviathan from its brief geological slumber with uncertain historic consequences (Fagan 2004).

Under the spectre of rapid and profound climate change, a new social topography of risk has emerged. Humanity’s relationship to nature no longer appears as a domain of controlled manipulation. Instead, it opens a fissured terrain of profound vulnerability scoured by the power of capricious climatic forces. Such inversions have inevitably created profound anxieties concerning humanity’s ability to shape its own future (Chakrabarty 2009; Hulme 2010). According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), climate change calls into question the very ideas of development and progress to which the project of modernity is tethered. Failure to recognise and deal with the effects of climate change, it estimates, will consign the poorest 40 per cent of the world’s population to a future of diminished opportunity and will sharpen the already acute divisions between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (UNDP 2007). On these grounds, climate represents a powerful agent of anti-development that, left unchecked, will roll back the already uneven achievements of the modern era.

In response, a dominant policy and academic literature has hastily emerged under the banner of climate change adaptation. This body of work builds from the seemingly self-evident proposition that, if the climate is changing in ways that threaten the existing parameters and future well-being of society, humanity must adapt through a process of planned adjustment that can safeguard against such profound and escalating risks (IPCC 2007). The idea of adaptation has therein become a rallying cry intended to catalyse a determined human response to the threats posed by climate change (Adger, Lorenzoni and O’Brien 2010; Leary et al. 2010). Considerable governmental energies are currently leveraged in its pursuit. Noticeably, in the field of international development, the goal of climate change adaptation now acts as a shared rubric for a diversity of planned interventions, drawing international agencies, governments, corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social movements into a common and encompassing framework (Ireland 2012).

Notwithstanding a great deal of sympathy with the stated intentions of adaptation as a normative goal, in what follows I argue that its framework should not be considered an exclusive way of conceptualising the acute challenges that climatic change duly raises. On the contrary, despite its current dominance in academic and policy debates, the salience of adaptation within contemporary policymaking rests less on its conceptual integrity and more on its ability to render climatic change legible to the registers of governmental planning. This intrinsically biopolitical impetus, I contend, comes at the expense of obscuring vital political questions surrounding power and sustainability in an era of dynamic global transformations. Rather than proceeding from the foundation of adaptation, this book asks instead how we might read contemporary climate change differently through the lens of political ecology. While I do not provide a systematic reconstruction of political ecology as a field – a task which has been variously undertaken elsewhere (e.g. Peet and Watts 2004; Neumann 2005; Robbins 2012) – I seek here to illustrate its compelling features as an entry point into analysing the narratives and practices through which climate change is both produced and experienced.

To do so, the chapter draws together a series of shared concerns about power, representation and the production of lived environments that bind political ecology together as an analytical framework. First, I take seriously the notion of political ecology as a field that duly combines the concerns of ecology and political economy in a way that “encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also between classes and groups within society itself” (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987: 17). I elaborate how this perspective allows us to get to the core of the relational dimensions of a global political ecology in which the couplings of prosperity and marginalisation, security and vulnerability, and abundance and degradation are produced and reproduced together through overlapping structures of power across spatial scales (Blaikie et al. 1994; Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011b). Subsequently, the chapter engages with a second pillar of political ecology analysis that considers how representation forms an inherent dimension of such power relations (Escobar 1995; Peet and Watts 1996; Escobar 1999; Blaikie 2001). Following this trajectory, I chart the ways in which climate change adaptation operates as a discursive apparatus that renders climate change legible in a narrow and constrained fashion. In particular, I critique its grounding notion of climate as an external system that provides exogenous stimulus and shocks to which society must then adapt. The latter dichotomy, I note, appears peculiarly unsuited to a world in which human and meteorological forces have become intrinsically intertwined and co-productive.

To go beyond the imagery of society and climate as separate systems locked into an endless dance of adaptation, I argue that we must push at the frontiers of political ecology by drawing insights from radical geography (Smith 1984; Harvey 1996; Castree 2001), urban political ecology (Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003; Swyngedouw 2004; Kaika 2005), poststructuralist ‘more-than-human’ ontologies (Latour 1993; Bennett 2010; Head and Gibson 2012) and ecological anthropology (Ingold 2000, 2011). In so doing, the chapter draws out how a reworked political ecology framework can help us grapple with the complex couplings of human and meteorological forces through which our lived environments are actively yet unequally produced. This approach, I contend, provides a means by which we can write questions of power more articulately into our analyses of climate change and social transformation. It, therefore, opens a deeper set of political questions about power, production and environmental change than is possible within the paradigm of climate change adaptation.

Political ecology and the critique of adaptation

For many analysts grounded in the early works of political ecology there likely arises a sense of déjà vu when surveying the current debates on climate change adaptation. A sharp engagement with the paradigm of cultural ecology and its core concepts of adaptation and homeostasis was one of the birthing grounds of political ecology as a field in the 1980s. For cultural ecologists, the concept of adaptation provided an analytical framework by which to situate the relative ability of humans to respond flexibly to shifts in their environment as part of a broader processes of human cultural evolution (Harrison 1993). From climatic shifts to land degradation, humans were seen to react to environmental change by first coping with and then adapting to successive series of external stresses and stimuli. This ongoing process of adaptation, however, required changes not only the way that humans engaged with the natural environment – such as shifts in cropping or migrations to exploit new ecological niches – but also in the belief systems that structured such practices. For cultural ecologists, therefore, the concept of adaptation described a cumulative series of adjustments comprising the interaction of social practices, systems of meaning and technological changes that might enhance the ability of a given community to cope with environmental stresses (Rappaport 1979). The expected result of such adaptive strategies was not simply a process of behavioural change but rather of a broader cultural evolution that could realign human activities and belief systems with the demands of a changing external environment. Successful adaptation, therefore, created the grounds for a new homeostasis or equilibrium in the relationship between communities and their natural environments.

For early political ecologists, both the analytical framework and political conclusions of adaptation analysis appeared to be problematic. In proposing the centrality of engrained belief systems to homeostasis, the explicit functionalism of adaptation analyses easily could be inverted to frame environmental degradation as the outcome of entrenched yet irrational forms of land management resulting from traditional values that were rendered anachronistic in a rapidly changing world (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; see also, Robbins 2012). As such, although cultural ecologists often celebrated the lifestyles of the farming, hunting and herding groups they studied, the narrative of adaptation could be reworked for quite different purposes. For modernisation theorists, the demands of economic development required a profound transformation in the value orientations of postcolonial agrarian populations to overcome their perceived proclivity for subsistence-orientated and risk-adverse livelihoods. The political stakes were high. Under the lens of modernisation, a failure to crack the nut of traditional agricultural practices and their associated belief systems could leave societies trapped in a stagnant dynamic in which resource use would remain inefficient and prone to depletion under the pressures of population growth. Authors such as Bert Hoselitz, therefore, were remarkably brazen about what must be done:

Value systems offer special resistances to change, but without wishing to be dogmatic, I believe, it may be stated that their change is facilitated if the material economic environment in which they can flourish is destroyed or weakened. This seems to be the experience from the history of Western European economic development, and it seems to be confirmed by the findings of students of colonial policy and administration.

(Hoselitz 1952: 15)

For political ecologists, the political ambivalence of cultural ecology’s adaptation analysis stemmed from its marginalisation of a crucial set of historical dynamics that were busily shaping agrarian environments. In contrast to the self-regulating localism of adaptation perspectives, political ecologists sought to situate localised processes within a multi-scalar series of causal forces. Far from isolated regions of untouched tradition, authors such as Piers Blaikie (1985) emphasised how rural regions betrayed the complex outcomes of colonial forms of land management and incorporation into capitalist commodity relations, both of which had diverse and contradictory effects upon local social relations and environmental landscapes. In this reading, the problems of land degradation, soil erosion and deforestation could not be placed at the feet of ‘irrational’ peasants who failed to adequately adapt to changing social and environmental stimuli. Rather, those biophysical trends spoke to the way that integrating agricultural production within regional and international accumulation dynamics created new forms of enclosure and surplus extraction that disrupted the socio-ecological fabric of rural regions (Blaikie, Cameron and Seddon 1983; Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). In transforming agrarian environments and producing new forms of marginality, these social forces created the grounds upon which peasants were increasingly pressured to act as agents of environmental degradation in a fraught struggle to meet subsistence needs (Watts 1983).

This analytical perspective posed a direct challenge to the narrow conceptual framework of adaptation. As Richard Peet and Michael Watts put it, “market integration, commercialisation and the dislocation of customary forms of resource management – in place of adaptation or homeostasis – became the lodestars of a critical alternative to the older cultural or human ecology” (2004: 9). Conspicuously, the emphasis on social differentiation under the forces of capitalist commodity production allowed political ecology to question who or what could be said to ‘adapt’. While cultural ecology tended to represent rural communities as relatively cohesive and bounded entities, political ecologists argued that such representations obscured the fractured social terrain of rapidly changing agrarian spaces and the diversity of competing interests within them (Robbins 2000). In so doing, political ecologists tugged at the analytical seams of the adaptation concept in a way that still holds resonance for contemporary debates. In place of unitary communities struggling to adapt to external stresses, political ecology emphasised how hierarchical forms of local resource management were consolidated under power differentials built upon relations of class, gender, caste and ethnicity (Mosse 2007). Such fractures, moreover, also reflected the divergent ways that social groups were situated within networks of commodity production and institutionalised political power that stretched far outside the locality in question (Watts 2004). What could adaptation signify in conditions where social groups experience the gains and risks inherent to social and ecological transformations in profoundly different and unequal way...