Global environmental change II: Political economies of vulnerability to climate change

Abstract

Though rarely described as such, vulnerability to climate change is fundamentally a matter of political economy. This progress report provides a reading of contemporary research on vulnerability to climate change through a political economic lens. It interprets the research as explaining the interplay between ideas about vulnerability, the institutions that create vulnerability, and those actors with interests in vulnerability. It highlights research that critiques the idea of vulnerability, and that demonstrates the agency of those at risk as they navigate the intersecting, multi-scalar and teleconnected institutions that shape their choices in adapting to climate change. The report also highlights research that is tracking the way powerful institutions and interests that create vulnerability are themselves adapting by appropriating the cause of the vulnerable, depoliticising the causes of vulnerability, and promoting innovations in finance and markets as solutions. In these ways, political and economic institutions are sustaining themselves and capitalising on the opportunities presented by climate change at the expense of those most at risk.

Assemblage theory and disaster risk management

“…By focusing on the six components of the DRM Assemblage, research using the framework is directed to understanding, critiquing and potentially challenging the ways in which diverse techniques and technologies of DRM attempt to manage uneven relationships of a more-than-human life (Anderson, 2012;Donovan, 2017). A focus on 'root causes' is replaced by a focus on how place-specific political, scientific, economic and social imaginations become dominant futures-in-themaking and how these imagined futures interact with uncertain more-than-human hazards to lead to the continued territorialisation of inequalities and vulnerabilities in disaster events (Barnett, 2018(Barnett, , 2020Granjou et al, 2017;Grove, 2014b). The way in which these vulnerabilities might be understood and addressed is explored not only through transdisciplinary hazard assessments and radical disaster studies (Gaillard, 2019) but also through the literature on feminist ethics of care and sustainability (de La Bellacasa, 2017;Kinkaid, 2019).…”

A Meta-Synthesis of Policy Recommendations Regarding Human Mobility in the Context of Climate Change

“…There is critical need and value in initiatives that address ‘vulnerability’ and improve ‘adaptive capacity’ by investing in adaptation and human development in local sites of climate risk, thereby potentially limiting the need for out-migration. However, policy initiatives that focus on ‘the vulnerable’ and proximate social and environmental contexts are at risk of obscuring complex power relations and global inequities that create these vulnerabilities or limit adaptive capacity [ 108 ].…”

Reimagining climate‐informed development: From “matters of fact” to “matters of care”

“…The aim of the climate and development agenda becomes that of eliminating vulnerabilities through the antidotes of adaptation and resilience (J. Barnett, 2020), fostering a certain kind of individuality described by the "arrogantly self-sufficient, independent and invulnerable master subject" (Gilson, 2011, p. 312).…”