{"id":415,"date":"2024-02-10T16:16:27","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T16:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.digitalclimatefutures.org.uk\/?page_id=415"},"modified":"2024-09-02T15:21:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-02T15:21:17","slug":"rgs-ibg-2024-call-for-papers-de-or-re-colonising-climate-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.digitalclimatefutures.org.uk\/index.php\/rgs-ibg-2024-call-for-papers-de-or-re-colonising-climate-adaptation\/","title":{"rendered":"RGS-IBG 2024 Panel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

De- or re-colonising climate adaptation?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Indigenous and local knowledge in the climate adaptation machine\u202f<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our project team chaired an exciting panel at RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2024\u00a0London, August 27-30<\/em>. Thanks to all those who attended<\/strong> (full details in RGS-IBG detailed programme here<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u00bb\u00a0Thilo van der Haegen (University of Hamburg)<\/em>
What is Indigenous Knowledge in Contemporary Settler-Colonial Capitalism? The Case of Indigenous Real-Estate Development in Today\u2019s Vancouver<\/strong><\/p>\n\t\t\t

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ABSTRACT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Indigenous worldviews are increasingly hailed as decolonial solutions in efforts towards the creation of sustainable futures in different contexts. But what exactly are Indigenous worldviews in contemporary contexts shaped by settler-colonial capitalism? One interpretation to that question can be found in large-scale real-estate developments that are pursued by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations in what is now Vancouver, Canada. While such developments display \u201cIndigenous\u201d design features, they also use the notion of \u201cIndigenous stewardship\u201d to \u201cgreen\u201d large-scale development for the purpose of maximum value extraction. Does Indigenous knowledge in this context only refer to features of the developments\u2019 design or to a broader understanding of how to navigate settler-colonial space through capitalist real-estate development? By raising such empirical examples, this paper contributes to the debate around the usage of Indigeneity in the propagation of sustainable futures. It raises questions around the delineation of \u201cIndigenous knowledge\u201d as a category by highlighting that Indigeneity is intrinsically intertwined with the capitalist economy and its contradictions. Contemporary Indigenous worldviews \u201care not reducible to capitalism\u2019s side-effects\u201d (Radcliffe, 2020: 375) but shaped by their \u201centanglements with colonial formations\u201d (Pasternak, 2015: 187). Indigenous actors aren\u2019t always looking for non-capitalist alternatives, and notions of Indigenous knowledge should thus not delineate it as the Other to modernity and exchange value. How can a decolonial interpretation of Indigenous knowledge look like that neither depicts Indigenous peoples as an innocent part of primordial nature, nor simply incorporates Indigenous values as a feature of green capitalism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Literature<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pasternak S (2015) How capitalism will save colonialism: The privatization of reserve lands in Canada.\u00a0Antipode<\/em>\u00a047(1): 179\u2013196. DOI: 10.1111\/anti.12094.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Radcliffe SA (2020) Geography and indigeneity III: Co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity\u2019s economies.\u00a0Progress in Human Geography<\/em>\u00a044(2): 374\u2013388. DOI: 10.1177\/0309132519827387.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n

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\u00bb\u00a0Ankita Shrestha (University of Oslo)<\/em>,\u00a0Giovanna Gioli (Bath Spa University)<\/em>
On the Agency of Indigenous Objects<\/strong><\/p>\n\t\t\t

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ABSTRACT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On the Agency of Indigenous Objects<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1995, Arun Agrawal warned against resolving the dichotomy of indigenous versus scientific knowledge and instead called for \u2018greater autonomy for indigenous peoples\u2019 (p. 413). By the late 2000s, sustainable development\u2019s greenest commodity of \u2018indigenous knowledge\u2019 was articulating indigeneity and its relation to power (Agrawal, 2005). As climate change adaptation literature now saturates itself with theorizations on \u2018the government of things\u2019 (Lemke, 2015, 2017; Barad, 2007), new materialism finds its decolonial calling. As commitments to decolonizing knowledges grow, decolonial practices themselves are informed by an ontological overenthusiasm of a contemporary world where \u2018agency flourishes\u2019 (Rekret, 2018, p. 64). This world however lacks the urge to question how agency is generated in and may be extracted within social relations. This paper explores how this overenthusiasm translates as the valorization of an \u2018inner logic\u2019 of the indigenous peoples central to climate adaptation research, to whom agency is merely loaned. Our scholarship turns to Nepal, where on-going forms of coloniality refuse to be acknowledged as colonial. There, we interrogate how indigenous knowledges hailed as climate action and justice solutions continue to be produced within state\u2019s authoritarian forms of power (resurrected through caste, class, and gender hierarchies) central to the governmentalization of a capitalist state patriarchy. This paper draws much needed attention to how haphazard calls for decolonization further abstracts indigenous peoples, knowledges, and labour that ultimately become \u2018an alibi\u2019 (Rekret, 2018, p. 65) for capitalist control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.\u00a0Development and Change<\/em>,\u00a026<\/em>(3), 413\u2013439. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00560.x<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agrawal, A. (2005). The Politics of Indigenous Knowledge.\u00a0Australian Academic and Research Libraries<\/em>,\u00a036<\/em>(2), 71\u201381. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/00048623.2005.10721249<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barad, K. (2007).\u00a0Meeting the universe halfway<\/em>\u202f: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning<\/em>\u00a0(pp. XIII, 524). Duke University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lemke, T. (2015). New Materialisms: Foucault and the \u2018Government of Things\u2019\u00a0Theory, Culture & Society<\/em>,\u00a032<\/em>(4), 3\u201325. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/0263276413519340<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lemke, T. (2017). Materialism without matter: the recurrence of subjectivism in object-oriented ontology.\u00a0Distinktion (Aarhus)<\/em>,\u00a018<\/em>(2), 133\u2013152. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/1600910X.2017.1373686<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rekret, P. (2018). The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge.\u00a0Theory, Culture & Society<\/em>,\u00a035<\/em>(7-8), 49\u201372. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/0263276418806369<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n

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\u00bb\u00a0Giovanna Gioli (Bath Spa University)<\/em>, Giovanni Bettini (Lancaster University)
Integration through datafication: A global mapping of \u202flocal and indigenous knowledges in climate services and climate smart interventions\u202f<\/strong><\/p>\n\t\t\t

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ABSTRACT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In line with the growing consensus around the \u201cusefulness\u201d of plural knowledges (see e.g. recent IPCC reports), many attempts have been made to include indigenous and local practices in climate services and \u2018climate smart\u2019 interventions, facilitated by the digital turn in climate adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on examples gathered by the global mapping conducted by the Digital Climate Futures project, the paper scrutinizes and classify forms in which indigenous and local knowledge have been included in climate adaptation interventions at the intersection with digital technologies. Our analysis shows the reductionism and extractivism underlying many \u2018inclusions\u2019 of different knowledges, which results into their reduction into\u202fdata<\/em>\u202fto be weaponised in frameworks, reports, and models, and their generalization into\u202fsolutions<\/em>\u202fto be added in adaptation repositories and expected to be scalable and benefit different contexts. Through processes of datafication, plural epistemologies that do not align with the hegemonic production of knowledge around climate change are reified into data to serve the dominant epistemology and support the production of a certain understanding of risk. Rather than learning to think\u202fotherwise<\/em>, and accepting the structural changes that this entails, many interventions result in the assimilation of alterity into the adaptation machine.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n

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Vanessa Burns (University of Sheffield)<\/em>
Adaptation and Indigenous Labour: Colonial extraction at the climate frontier<\/strong><\/p>\n\t\t\t

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ABSTRACT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An enormous amount of labour is being undertaken in equatorial regions to adapt to the effects of climate change. This labour is often unpaid, hazardous, and carried out under conditions of environmental violence that in postcolonial nations draw parallels with historic forced labour and colonial violence (Burns, 2019). In the South Pacific, these parallels come together in the contemporary livelihoods and community histories of the Australian South Sea Islanders and the Indo-Fijians, and the South Pacific sugar industries. Endemic to the South Pacific islands, sugarcane has been intrinsic to the region\u2019s Indigenous culture, colonial expansion, nation-building, and the modern economy. The indentured labour histories of the region\u2019s sugar industries are contested by scholars and activists, pitting the histories of oral-based peoples against 150 years of whitewashing. The cane fields of both Australia and Fiji remain controversial sites of racialised agrarian reform.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While sugarcane is exceptionally resilient – the only tropical crop resilient to the region\u2019s increase in category five cyclones – extreme weather radically changes industry labour conditions. The labour involved in growing cane in Australia and Fiji is now failing to meet the decent work indicators set by the International Labour Organization. Through historical, ethnographic, and collaborative qualitative research, I compare historical and contemporary labour conditions and test the concept of adaptation labour (Burns, 2021; Johnson and Mikulewicz et al., 2023; Burns and Thornton et al., 2024) as a new framework for analysing adaptation justice in the South Pacific sugar industry.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n

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\u00bb\u00a0Vidya Pancholi (Lancaster University)<\/em>
Digital climate adaptations: enabling participatory adaptation, or paving the way to digital colonialism? Insights from a case study on Bihar, India<\/strong><\/p>\n\t\t\t

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ABSTRACT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the promises of \u2018smart\u2019 adaptation measures is its alleged ability to enable the participation of \u2018end users\u2019 and communities, mobilising local knowledge, and leapfrogging technical and economic obstacles. Whether this is actually fulfilled deserves scrutiny, and here the question of cognitive justice becomes key: when an inevitably situated and hegemonic understanding of digital climate services is mobilised in the Majority World to reach out to smallholder farmers and other groups at the fringes of globalised culture and capital, it is imperative to look for forms of \u2018digital colonialism\u2019, entailing the exclusion and\/or assimilation of forms of knowledge, worldviews and values from the framing of the main issues. It is also key to understand how communities navigate, reshape and resist these digital interventions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This paper engages with these themes through an empirical study of digital adaptation initiatives in the Indian state of Bihar. Having a large proportion of people dependent on climate-sensitive livelihoods (Kumar, 2021) and facing extreme vulnerability to climate change (Dasgupta et al., 2020), Bihar has received a considerable amount of attention on climate services and digital adaptation initiatives (see for example, the climate-smart agriculture initiative pioneered by CGIAR).\u00a0Ranging from farm activities to important poverty reduction schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), the synergy between adaptation and the digital has become pervasive.\u202f\u202fPresenting insights from an exploratory phase of fieldwork, the paper offers insights into how users and communities engage with, co-design, employ, and resist such applications, in a society where landownership, access to employment, resources and technologies are deeply fraught along the lines of caste, gender, and ethnicity.\u202f<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Session convenors:<\/strong> <\/em> Giovanna Gioli; Giovanni Bettini; Vidya Pancholi; Sian Sullivan <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Panel Theme Description<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

(link to call for papers in PDF VERSION)<\/a><\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heterogenous objects that are referred to as \u201cIndigenous knowledge\u201d and \u201clocal knowledge\u201d (Indigenous and Local Knowledge or ILK in IPCC\u2019s lexicon) are receiving more and more recognition as \u201csolutions providers\u201d for the climate emergency. From their extensive presence in IPCC\u2019s Assessment Reports, to the recent White House Indigenous Knowledge Guidance for Federal Agencies (White House 2022), the time seems to have come to support indigenous science. In the current wave of adaptation interventions, IKL is almost always invoked as key ingredient for fair and effective adaptation measures, as \u201cunique information sources about past changes and potential solutions to present issues\u201d (AR6 IPCC 2022). Indigenous groups and \/or local comminutes are invoked as \u2018natural\u2019 stewards for fragile ecosystems, or as the implementers of low-impact, grassroots climate-resilient agriculture and conservation projects. These discourses are often portrayed as efforts towards a \u2018decolonisation\u2019 of climate imaginaries and adaptation practices. \u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, under the weight of the epistemology structuring the production of knowledge on climate change and the related hegemony of the climate services paradigm, other <\/em>forms of knowledge are routinely reduced to sources of data to be used, in isolation from the contexts in which they were produced, to fill gaps in scientific frameworks and models (Klenk et al 2017), or as repositories of replicable and scalable \u201csolutions\u201d(Petzold et al 2020; Latulippe and Klenk 2020).\u202f\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We acknowledge the work of those analysing how\/why indigeneity has been reduced to instrumental imaginaries of perseverance and resilience (Chandler & Reid 2020). The climate reductionism (Hulme 2011; Chakraborty & Sherpa 2021) informing frameworks and institutions operating within contemporary global adaptation regimes (Paprocki 2022) operate through the detachment of virtuous local practices and indigenous knowledge from situated struggles, power dynamics and from indigenous resistance. The shadow of climate reductionism hides the existence of conflicting interests and worldviews at multiple scales, obliterating non-compatible but situated forms of governance, values and laws, and visons of the future.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the clash of epistemologies and the power relationships entailed in the hierarchy through which climate change knowledge is reproduced are not carefully scrutinised and acknowledged, then the climate adaptation machine becomes an enabler of novel forms of knowledge extractivism and is connivant with the hijacking and depoliticization of struggles that are then reabsorbed into global racial capitalism. For instance, seed sovereignty struggles risk being hijacked by the poverty\/adaptation finance machine \u2013 e.g. with the adoption of specific seed included as condition for accessing a premium in weather index insurance schemes issued by global reinsurers and development agencies. In many cases in which ILK are intertwined with \u2018smart\u2019 approaches (Taylor & Bhasme 2020), the assumed \u201cneutrality\u201d of digital technologies (from mobile phones to satellites) further reinforces these processes and plays a central role in facilitating the collection, integration and use\/exploitation of local\/indigenous knowledge. \u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this session, we welcome papers and reflections which might speak to themes and concepts such as (by no means limited to):\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n