Marcus Taylor - Making a World of Adaptation: Climate Change, Development and Governmentality in Agrarian South Asia
From the paddy fields of Uttar Pradesh to the shantytowns of
Ulaanbaatar, the compelling need to 'adapt now!' is represented as a
natural response to the threats posed by contemporary climate change.
For international development institutions and national governments,
this idea of adaptation has become a touchstone concept on which
development interventions are now planned, organised and legitimised.
Drawing on case studies from agrarian South and Central Asia, this
presentation charts how climate change adaptation has emerged as a new
and intrinsically political domain of development practice that operates
within a wider spectrum of governmental technologies that represent,
order and reshape the agrarian world. In its attempt to render climate
change governable, the adaptation rubric repeatedly obscures the the
complex ways in which agrarian environments are produced through
relationships of credit and debt, unequal land access, and fickle flows
of water and people. A political ecology perspective can help challenge
adaptation for its silencing of crucial questions about power and
sustainability in contemporary agrarian environments.
