Transcript Pathways to Sustainability: environment and development

Surfacing alternatives, rescuing diversities:
Reflecting on climate change policy
narratives – and beyond
Presentation to Climate Change and Science
Studies Workshop, Copenhagen, April 2009
Melissa Leach
Climate change science-policy
• Not just sciences and scientific discourses, but policy and
policy discourses
• Science and policy are mutually constructed
• Arrays of mechanisms, practices, regulations, platforms,
techniques – underpinned by sciences and spawning new
applied ones (scenarios, baselines, risk assessments….)
• Policy-oriented (social/interdisciplinary) sciences –
sustainability science, resilience studies,
adaptation/development studies; disaster and hazards
research
How are these landing in particular places?
What are they doing? What are they excluding?
Policy narratives
• Produced by people and institutions…. actors
• Beginning – a system, framed (how bounded, what scale?)
• Imaginary - futures desired or feared (what ideas, possibilities,
values, goals?)
• Middle – a set of envisaged actions, that must deal with
dynamics (what shocks or stresses?) and incomplete
knowledge (what risks, uncertainties, ambiguities, possible
surprises?)
• Construction of publics – who will act, who will change their
behaviour, respond
• End – catastrophe averted, outcome achieved, sustainability
enhanced
Climate change-alities
• Co-construction of these elements
• Governmentality – with and without government
• Some narratives justify and become interlocked with powerful
pathways – trajectories of intervention and change
• But these meet lived worlds
• Unintended effects, interpretative dynamics, exclusions,
counter-politics…….
Adaptation narratives
• Multiple actors in a growing adaptation policy/research
community; convergence with humanitarian and disaster
risk reduction agencies
• Communities need to sustain their livelihoods in the face
of change-related hazards (floods, droughts…..)
• Vulnerability (justice)
• Short-term shocks (resilience); risks (prediction, early
warning….)
• Adaptive capacity; the adaptive, coping community
Exclusions, alternatives
• Kutch, Western India
• Histories of living and dealing with water uncertainty; long term
stresses as well as shocks
• Poetics and meanings
Exclusions, alternatives
• Multiple hazards and scarcities – felt and responded to differently by
women and men, farmers and pastoralists, elite and poor
• Ideas of adaptation and community intersect with embedded social
differentiation and conflict
• Litanies of water scarcity as discourses of political marginalisation;
‘Rainfall is declining’ (despite the figures); imaginaries of sustained
plentiful water enwrapped with regional political aspiration
Mitigation narratives – forest versions
Deforestation causes global warming: Key role for developing
countries in fighting greenhouse gas emissions
4 September 2006, Rome – Most people assume that global
warming is caused by burning oil and gas. But in fact between
25 and 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the
atmosphere each year – 1.6 billion tonnes – is caused by
deforestation. About 200 experts, mostly from developing
countries, met in Rome last week to address this issue in a
workshop organized by the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and hosted by FAO.
“We are working to solve two of the key environmental issues –
deforestation and global warming – at the same time,” said FAO
Senior Forestry Officer Dieter Schoene.
Trees are 50 percent carbon. When they are felled or burned,
the C02 they store escapes back into the air. According to FAO
figures, some 13 million ha of forests worldwide are lost every
year, almost entirely in the tropics. Deforestation remains high in
Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000385/index.html
Mitigation narratives – forest versions
• Convergence of deforestation/conservation and climate change
science-policy communities; voluntary markets, REDD in negotiation
• Forest plantation and ‘avoided deforestation’ can increase/sustain
greenhouse gas absorption, and reduce losses from carbon stored
in trees and soils
• ‘Fixing’ future stability from a present snapshot; baseline and
alternative scenarios; prediction and control
• Airbrushed land users (actual or potential forest land to spare);
deforesting, breeding, immigrating, land-hungry farmers (baseline
scenarios); incentivisable, marketised communities (carbon
payments will halt deforestation)
Exclusions, alternatives
• Kenema, eastern Sierra Leone
• Meanings of carbon forestry within lived forest landscape, and
political-economic history of resource exploitation
Exclusions, alternatives
• Long-term , overlapping dynamics of forests, farming , population
and climate – forest recovering from drought and retreat 300 years
ago; depopulation and expansion 150 years ago and 1990s ; forestsoil carbon-farming dynamics; poverty-land clearing dynamics.
Lessons from history: non-linearity, sensitivity to future climate
shocks
• Living with a dynamic forest-farming landscape; tacit agro-ecological
knowledge
• Tensions in predictive baseline scenarios….
Exclusions, alternatives
• Another way of ‘taking our land’
• Power-laden negotiations amongst timber operators and
conservationists, politicians and paramount chiefs, women and men
will determine what mechanisms mean in practice
• Struggles for livelihood and community – and against forest animals
– in rebuilding lives after a decade of war
• Scope for grounded, mitigation/adaptation in lived-in-landscapes
(biochar, conservation resources) provided local control assured?
Alternative narratives and pathways
• Opening up to what powerful policy narratives exclude
• Recognising alternative narratives, imaginaries and subjectivities –
social and political as much as technical (counter-politics,
resistance, reinterpretation)
• Acknowledging how these emerge from lived and historical
experience and memory – narratives that link past and future
• Considering a wider diversity and multiple scaling of responses
(spreading eggs among multiple baskets)
• Building pathways that link CC response with livelihood, welfare and
justice priorities and imaginations
Mess and reliability
• Moving beyond risk management and ‘clean-slate’ policy designs:
acknowledging climate change and policy as a zone of uncertainty,
ambiguity, surprise, mess
• Emanates from interactions between social/political/natural
dynamics, and clashes/tacit negotiations amongst competing
framings
• Beyond distinction between macro-design and microoperations/individual behaviour: middle zone of interactions,
contingencies, patterns, anticipation; tacking between specific
events/cases and broader systems; across scales; experiential and
formal knowledge.
• Understand and work with/from the ‘real-time’ happenings in these
zones in which tacit, experiential knowledge – of scientists,
managers, local people – is key
• Identifying and building new networks and ‘high reliability’ (Roe) or
‘bridging’ professionals and skills
Politics and citizenships
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Engaging in a politics of narratives/pathways
Making citizen engagement central
Beyond liberal, consumer, and communitarian perspectives
Emergent coalitions and performances:
‘Practised engagement of social solidarities around issues of
concern’
Scientists and policymakers as citizens too….
Rights and justice - cognitive, imaginative, material
Multiple routes of mobilisation and knowledge politics – antagonistic
as well as deliberative
Social sciences which are positioned and reflexive, and encourage
this in others……