Water Crisis Adaptation: Defending a Strong Right Against Displacement from the Home

Abstract

This essay defends a strong right against displacement as part of a basic individual right to secure access to one's home. The analysis is purposefully situated within the difficult context of climate change adaptation policies. Under increasing environmental pressures, especially regarding water security, there are weighty reasons motivating the forced displacement of persons-to safeguard water resources or prevent water-related disasters. Even in these pressing circumstances, I argue, individuals have weighty rights to secure access to their homes. I explain how the home provides a functional context for conditions of autonomous agency. Being coerced from the home disrupts and subverts the conditions necessary for autonomous processes. I conclude by suggesting that the right to the home could be a foundational element of territorial rights.

Control over one’s environment? Leveling political capabilities to advance procedural justice in Flood Risk Management

“…Just as with intangible losses such as attachment to place and psychological stress, infringement of one's autonomy cannot be compensated with utilitarian compensation frameworks. Furthermore, if people are relocated after all, quality participation in the development of relocation sites is critical, as the new place should allow the person to lead a similar kind of life as they had chosen for themselves in the old location (Nine, 2016).…”

Associative Solidarity, Relational Goods, and Autonomy for Refugees: What Does it Mean to Stand in Solidarity with Refugees?

“…Homelessness can have nefarious effects on their capacity for autonomous agency. 40 Another form of social deprivation may stem from the fact that those persecuted by their states of origin arrive in an asylum-granting state as asylum-seekers. Put differently, in the first instance, asylum-seekers do not have the status of members, nor that of members to be.…”

Environmental Heritage and the Ruins of the Future

“…We can employ this concept to set the limits and aims of how coastal places are reimagined: our rethinking of coastal places should aim to promote the collective continuance of local communities, minimizing harms and charting pathways that will allow the adaptation of socio-ecological traditions and systems to alternative ways of engaging with important places, and ultimately novel spaces as well. Recent philosophical work on displacement (both climate-induced and otherwise) has emphasized the importance of "located life-plans," the ways in which our comprehensive intentions for the future are tied to place (Stilz 2013) and the particular threat to autonomy posed by coercive displacement from the home (Nine 2016). Treating collective continuance as both a goal and constraint on rethinking future ruins offers the promise of avoiding these moral hazards, though they are without doubt pitfalls about which we should remain wary.…”