Hello Jon, perhaps unsurprisingly, I disagree strongly with the general thrust of your critique, but let me explain why, and permit me to start with something positive. I really do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts - and having read Ferguson and Mosse, I can confirm they are worth reading. I would add to the list Escobar's Encountering Development. Ferguson and Escobar in particular reveal the value of a discursive approach to understanding power, institutions, and development as a practice.
That said, I still don’t see their arguments - or yours - as undermining the value of a political ecology approach. Such an approach, too, can reveal unequal power relations and hegemonic discursive practices. If you prefer the style of Ferguson and Escobar, then I recommend you find a copy of Marcus Taylor's The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation: Livelihoods, Agrarian Change and the Conflicts of Development. He helps show the value of that approach more eloquently than I ever do. Nor do I see these streams of thought as eroding the utility of trying to optimize climate change adaptation efforts so that they become more attuned to justice and vulnerability issues. Of course the relationship between processes such as enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment are mutually constitutive with broader forces such as neo-liberalism, capitalism, development aid, and so on. (They also interrelate with each other). I never meant to imply that climate change adaptation was the sole driver or cause of these ills - instead, I hope my work illuminates how these broader factors begin to interact, reproduce, circulate, and then distort adaptation efforts. Let me remind you as well that we were drawing on some primary data (interviews) in the article and this did include practitioners of development aid in Bangladesh. Apparently many of the lessons learned from the 1960s have been forgotten on the ground, if they were ever truly learned to begin with. -----Original Message----- From: Jon Marco CHURCH [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 27 January 2018 11:42 To: Benjamin Sovacool <[email protected]> Cc: 'Ecopolitics' <[email protected]>; [email protected]; [email protected]; 'Karolina Kluczewska' <[email protected]>; 'Alice Baillat' <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Ecopolitics] When Climate Change Adaptation Goes Wrong Dear Prof. Sovacool, dear readers the three mailing lists, Many thanks for your reply. I apologize to those in the lists who are not interested in this matter. Prof. Maniates, who manages the GEP-ED list, asked me to expand on my email in ways that help better understand my concerns and objections. I believe that the article "Bamboo beating bandits: conflict, inequality, and vulnerability in the political ecology of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh" sends a wrong message, because the focus of the research question is misplaced. In the article, social performance is analyzed almost exclusively on the basis of the impact of climate change adaptation projects in the context of Bangladesh. According to the article and the press release below: - ADAPTATION PROJECTS transfer public assets into private hands or expand the roles of private actors into the public sphere (enclosure); - ADAPTATION PROJECTS limit access to resources or marginalize particular stakeholders in decision-making activities (exclusion); - ADAPTATION PROJECTS intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation (encroachment); - ADAPTATION PROJECTS aggravate the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsen concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community (entrenchment). The burden is put on adaptation projects as if they were the sole culprit. In my opinion, this is because this article almost completely ignores other variables that can influence the social performance of adaptation projects. For example, these projects are all implemented through development aid, which is known to lead sometimes to side-effects, such as policy fragmentation, capture and even corruption (Ferguson 1990; Lancaster 2007; Carothers 2011). These are the phenomena observed by the author. My argument is that, before making such bold claims about the negative impact of adaptation projects, other variables, such as development aid, should have explored to see whether they explain the poor social performance observed. Development aid and in general collective action is the most obvious one to me, but there are probably other factors too. However, there is only one reference to development aid in this article. Almost all other references concern Bangladesh, climate change or political ecology. To avoid this issue, the article should have at least expanded its bibliographic references and checked whether adaptation projects were in any way different from projects in other issue areas. For example, Jean-Philippe Platteau's "Monitoring elite capture in community-driven development" (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2004.00350.x/), and Arild Schou's "Who benefits from demand-driven distribution of HIV/AIDS services?" (https://doi.org/10.1002/pad.520/) seem good starting points to me. As a practitioner, I am convinced that this article is dangerous because, even if it mentions in the end that "not every adaptation project need perpetuate inequality, exclude others, or enclose and encroach upon people's property or livelihood", the main message conveyed throughout the paper and its press release is that climate change adaptation projects lead to enclosure, exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment. The literature on development aid and the practical experience of many professionals (Mosse 2011) shows that, unfortunately, these problems are not limited to adaptation projects, but common to many issue areas and countries. It is already difficult to raise awareness on climate change and other environmental issues. If then badly designed research papers start arguing that the social performance of adaptation projects is poor, which might be the case in the projects you studied, putting all the burden on adaptation projects and without checking for other factors, do you realize how difficult it becomes to defend climate action in front of so many competing issues and of so many people that are little aware or still skeptical about the need for climate adaptation? My take on the problems that you raise is that projects cannot address all issues at the same time. If the social performance of adaptation projects is not good, other projects and public policies that fight fragmentation, capture, corruption and other problems should try to address these issues in an iterative manner. I am not sure that adaptation projects can solve all problems by themselves. Similarly, development aid is good at some things, but not at all things. It must therefore constantly review its practices to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Fortunately, development aid changed a lot since the 1960s and keeps changing. Little by little, we will get there! In general, the article is written more carefully than the press release. I understand that universities and funding agencies request scholars to be catchy and have impact also outside of the ivory tower, but I would always take into consideration also the negative impact that what I write can possibly have, especially if findings are still very tentative and I have not checked for other potential explanations... Kind regards, Jon SOME REFERENCES ON DEVELOPMENT AID Mosse, D., ed. 2011. Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. New York: Berghahn Books. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: ”Development”, Depoliticization And Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carothers, T. 2011. Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve. Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment. Lancaster, C. 2007. Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. PS: Many thanks to Karolina Kluczewska's article on "Benefactor, industry or intruder? Perceptions of international organizations in Central Asia" (https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2017.1281220/) for these references! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
