Dear Benjamin,
Thank you for sharing your paper, I've enjoyed following your scholarship in recent years. I very much liked your Four E's as another way to interpreting and abstracting out from experiences on the ground and have included this paper in my urban adaptation course syllabus this spring. My colleagues and I had also written a paper in a similar vein as yours, "Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Critical Perspectives from the Global North and South<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0739456X16645166>", published in JPER in 2016. In our framework, we distinguished between "acts of commission" and "acts of omission" on the part of government-led adaptation projects. Across 8 cities (including Dhaka), we found that acts related to regulating and enforcing land use (or not), investing in infrastructure (or not), inclusion in planning processes (or not), and engagement with the private sector systematically benefited "the haves" over "the have nots", thereby deepening existing inequality. Our findings indicated that equity and justice in adaptation has to be understood relationally - not just was is done on behalf of or to the poor, but also how that compares to what is done on behalf of or for the middle and upper classes. And like the paragraph you quoted below, we also noted that not all adaptation projects result in these outcomes, but the fact that we found this pattern in such diverse cities suggested that there needs to be much more reflexive and critical thinking in adaptation project planning. Regarding your conversation with Professor Church, reviewers of our paper also questioned our selection of cases - some of which were more overtly about "development" or "disaster risk reduction" than "adaptation" per se. Our response to these comments was to note that localities embrace adaptation using different terminology, or mainstream it into their existing practices. Where places like fundamental infrastructure, "development as adaptation" is an important piece of adaptation; we cannot only look solely at the additive increment - the 1 foot taller seawall, but not run of the mill seawall projects. Finally, I recently read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and her chapter on post-tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka echoes much of the political ecology approach you took in the paper. That may also be of interest to you. All the best, Linda ------------------- Linda Shi Assistant Professor Department of City and Regional Planning Cornell University 213 Sibley Hall [email protected] ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Benjamin Sovacool <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 4:37:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [gep-ed] RE: [Ecopolitics] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong Hello Jon, thanks for taking the time to write and comment. I'll write you separately as I suspect most members of the list won't enjoy seeing a flurry of emails between us, but I did want to point out that I do not believe you are reading the piece closely or carefully. As you can see here, on p. 192, I am very, very careful to indicate that the piece is not about rejecting adaptation, but making it better: Lastly, the existence of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment in some Bangladeshi adaptation measures does not mean that they are always present or even frequently present. Nor does it imply that Bangladesh should abandon its adaptation efforts. There are many adaptation projects that seem to be producing a net social benefit despite the complex Bangladeshi political ecology surrounding them (Ahammad, Nandy, & Husnain, 2013; Chowdhury, 2008; Rawlani & Sovacool, 2011). So, not every adaptation project need perpetuate inequality, exclude others, or enclose and encroach upon people’s property or livelihood. Although political ecology processes can at times distort or mold adaptation projects and processes to the interests of dominant stakeholders, they do not necessarily or completely undermine or obfuscate all of the benefits of adaptation. Even the specific critiques raised, some of them quite sobering, are aimed at a target: improving and learning from adaptation’s political ecology so that the least vulnerable are helped, and so that benefits and burdens are made visible, and distributed fairly and according to representative processes. Planners and practitioners of adaptation projects need to become more cognizant of the potential for projects to harm others, or admit complicity in the processes of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment. So you're critique isn’t mutually exclusive to my suggestion - make adaptation more attuned to justice and vulnerability themes. While I am less familiar with those scholars writing the development cooperation literature, I suspect they wouldn’t disagree? -----Original Message----- From: Jon Marco CHURCH [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 21 January 2018 09:08 To: Benjamin Sovacool <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: 'Ecopolitics' <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; 'Karolina Kluczewska' <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; 'Alice Baillat' <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: RE: [Ecopolitics] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong Dear Prof. Sovacool, I am at the same time a scholar of sustainable development and a practitioner of development cooperation. I read with much interest your article. I think however that the focus of your research question is misplaced. Your research findings have little to do with adaptation to climate change. Most of them are common throughout development cooperation. The fact that there is a lot of funding available for projects on adaptation to climate change compared to other environmental issues exacerbates well-known problems with development cooperation. I am afraid that your article and its press release send a very wrong and dangerous message. Adaptation to climate change and in general resilience to exogenous shocks is very important in vulnerable countries like Bangladesh. The problem is not adaptation to climate change but development cooperation, which needs radical improvement. I would like to thank Professor Takei for sharing your work. Kind regards, J.M.Church -- Jon Marco CHURCH Associate Professor University of Reims IATEUR - BP 30 - 57 rue Pierre Taittinger - 51571 Reims Cedex - France Tel. : +33 (0)3 26 91 37 45 - www.univ-reims.fr<http://www.univ-reims.fr> New publication : < Soft power of Tajikistan on the water agenda >, in Water Resources in Central Asia, S.S. Zhiltsov et al. (ed.), Cham, Springer. -----Original Message----- From: Ecopolitics [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Milton Takei Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 2:57 AM To: Ecopolitics <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [Ecopolitics] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong To ecopolitics subscribers: The following is from: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> --Milton Takei Good morning from Europe everyone, As many of you know, much work in the community focuses on climate change mitigation, namely technologies, practices, and policies that can prevent emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. But equally important is adaptation, building resilience to the impacts of climate change. In that vein, drawing from two sets of interviews in Bangladesh, I was able to get the attached study into World Development by connecting it to concepts in political geography, political ecology, justice, and development studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17303285 Sovacool, BK. "Bamboo beating bandits: Conflict, inequality, and vulnerability in the political ecology of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh," World Development 102 (February, 2018), pp. 183-194. It's a bit dense and theoretical, but also troubling in its findings. To help try and spread some of its lessons, we've translated some of its findings into the blog below. Hopefully planners will start to design more equitable adaptation programs and policies going forward. Feedback most welcome on the conceptual framework as future work is applying it to disaster recovery, renewable energy, and low-carbon transitions. Benjamin http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/newsandevents/2017/findings/bangladesh [http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wcm/assets/media/25/banner/51585.jpg] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong in Bangladesh New research by Prof Benjamin Sovacool highlights the urgent need for climate change adaption policies in Bangladesh to be rethought. Bangladesh contributes little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, prone to a multitude of climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, tropical cyclones and storm surges, which are being worsened due to global warming. In addition to this, Bangladesh also has an extremely high population density with one of the worst rates of poverty in the world. Since May 2010, international donors have spent more than US$170m on climate change adaption efforts such as altering infrastructure, institutions and ecosystems in Bangladesh, bringing some success environmentally. Yet, research by Prof Sovacool <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/373957> examines and highlights how on the flip side of these efforts, existing social and political injustices within Bangladesh have been re-affirmed and exacerbated. In his paper 'Bamboo Beating Bandits: Conflict, Inequality, and Vulnerability in the Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh'<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X173032 85> Prof Sovacool reveals that climate change policies implemented under the country's National Adaptation Program of Action have ended up enabling elites to capture land through public servants, the military, and even gangs carrying bamboo sticks. Climate protection measures have also encroached upon village property, char (public) land, forests, farms, and other public commons. More shockingly, community coping strategies for climate change have actually entrenched class and ethnic hierarchies in some communities, trapping the poor, powerless and displaced in a patronage system, leading to increased human insecurity and intensified violent conflict. Using a mix of original interviews and a literature review, Prof Sovacool examined the processes of: * Enclosure - when adaptation projects transfer public assets into private hands or expand the roles of private actors into the public sphere * Exclusion - when adaptation projects limit access to resources or marginalize particular stakeholders in decision-making activities * Encroachment - when adaptation projects intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation * Entrenchment - when adaptation projects aggravate the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsen concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community _______________________________________________ Ecopolitics mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.opn.org/mailman/listinfo/ecopolitics_lists.opn.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. 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