Climate, Development, and Migration
Graduate Seminar Last Taught: Spring 2016
Much discussion about climate change in the contemporary moment focuses on the scientific debate over climate change and its projected effects, the social movements struggling to bring about climate justice, the public debate whether climate change exists, and the wranglings over international agreements to curb global warming (particularly those associated with the United Nations Environment Programme and its annual Conference of Parties meetings). These are all crucial to understanding climate change today. However, they do not tell the whole story of climate politics in the contemporary moment.
This course looks beyond these debates to explore the politics, policies, and programs of climate oriented development. Over the past decade, the development industry has undergone rapid transformations, evolving new policy and program frameworks to anticipate and address the effects of global warming in the Global South. The course focuses especially, though not exclusively, on approaches seeking to enhance adaptive capacities in order to prevent seemingly inevitable migration and on strategies to address present and future migration from various climate hotspots around the globe.
We will work from the premise that climate change is at once a set of real and material transformations in global and local environments and a range of imaginations and anxieties about the future that are enormously productive of interventions in the present. In other words, we will approach climate change as at once a set of empirical ecological realities that pose pressing policy challenges and as a set of profoundly social relations that are deeply bound up in questions of governance, security, and control. We will explore new paradigms that have emerged to address climate change—mitigation, adaptation, resilience, etc.—and investigate the question of mass-displacement in the face of climatological disaster. Along the way, we will look at policy documents, central arguments, and critical voices in the climate/development/migration debate.
Much discussion about climate change in the contemporary moment focuses on the scientific debate over climate change and its projected effects, the social movements struggling to bring about climate justice, the public debate whether climate change exists, and the wranglings over international agreements to curb global warming (particularly those associated with the United Nations Environment Programme and its annual Conference of Parties meetings). These are all crucial to understanding climate change today. However, they do not tell the whole story of climate politics in the contemporary moment.
This course looks beyond these debates to explore the politics, policies, and programs of climate oriented development. Over the past decade, the development industry has undergone rapid transformations, evolving new policy and program frameworks to anticipate and address the effects of global warming in the Global South. The course focuses especially, though not exclusively, on approaches seeking to enhance adaptive capacities in order to prevent seemingly inevitable migration and on strategies to address present and future migration from various climate hotspots around the globe.
We will work from the premise that climate change is at once a set of real and material transformations in global and local environments and a range of imaginations and anxieties about the future that are enormously productive of interventions in the present. In other words, we will approach climate change as at once a set of empirical ecological realities that pose pressing policy challenges and as a set of profoundly social relations that are deeply bound up in questions of governance, security, and control. We will explore new paradigms that have emerged to address climate change—mitigation, adaptation, resilience, etc.—and investigate the question of mass-displacement in the face of climatological disaster. Along the way, we will look at policy documents, central arguments, and critical voices in the climate/development/migration debate.
