Climate Change Solutions and Environmental Migration

The Injustice of Maladaptation and the Gendered 'Silent Offset' Economy

Anna Ginty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000372342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book lifts the taboo on maladaptation, a different driver of environmentally induced migration, which shines a light on the negative consequences arising from the solutions to climate change, adaptation and mitigation policies.

Through a systematic analysis and critique of existing mitigation and adaptation polices under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and international development community, and supplemented by a small empirical study in Indonesia, this book catalogues how maladaptation is manufactured under existing climate change solutions. It posits that customary communities in general- and women in particular- are disproportionately affected by the dominant market-driven logics that underscore current climate change solutions adopted by the UNFCCC. The injustice of maladaptation is highlighted as multi-faceted and explored using political, economic, social and ecological lenses, and the concept of environmental reintegration is also explored as a possible solution to this issue. Further possibilities are then presented in the Afterword, as a combination of what the new (post-neoliberalism) conjuncture could potentially look like.

This volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of climate change, environmental policy, environmental migration and displacement, development studies, I/NGOs and civil society actors and activists more broadly.

1 Conceptualising key terms and their links

Maladaptation, adaptation, mitigation, environmental migration, gender and justice

Introduction

Maladaptation in the context of climate change is a concept that has been little engaged with or understood outside the literature on geography, but is a key focus in this book, both in its links with climate change solutions and other key terms introduced in this overview. In 2010, geographers Jon Barnett and Saffron O’Neill in their seminal article, ‘Maladaptation’, defined it ‘as an action taken ostensibly to avoid or reduce vulnerability to climate change that impacts adversely on, or increases the vulnerability of other systems, sectors or social groups’ (Barnett & O’Neill 2010, p. 211). As ‘one of the earliest attempts to systematically conceptualise maladaptation’ (Juhola et al. 2016, p. 135), Barnett and O’Neill (2010) developed a typology of five pathways through which maladaptation can arise. In the absence of, or relative to, other alternatives, they suggest maladaptation arises when actions: ‘(1) increase emissions of greenhouse gases, (2) disproportionately burden the most vulnerable, (3) have high opportunity costs, (4) reduce incentives to adapt, and (5) set paths that limit the choices available to future generations [path dependency]’ (Barnett & O’Neill 2010, p. 211).

Following this early attempt, others have joined in developing conceptual and practical resources to analytically strengthen and operationalise the concept, notably Magnan et al. (2016), in offering various frameworks to assess the risk of maladaptation through several dimensions. Their research of the current theoretical literature on maladaptation and practice-oriented insights from specific case studies ‘shows that maladaptation is fundamentally a process that is influenced by multiple drivers and involves various temporal and spatial scales’ (Magnan et al. 2016, p. 662). The chapter analyses in this book on both adaptation (Chapter 3) and mitigation (Chapter 4) policies confirm this; that is, not only can today’s adaptation policy lead to tomorrow’s maladaptation, so too can mitigation. Magnan et al. (2016) thus make a broad call for ‘starting with the intention to avoid mistakes and not lock-in detrimental effects of adaptation-labelled initiatives … thus advocates for the anticipation of the risk of maladaptation to become a priority for decision makers and stakeholders at large, from the international to the local scales’ (Magnan et al. 2016, p. 646).

However, it is Juhola et al.’s (2016) redefinition of maladaptation that captures this book’s understanding of maladaptation, gained through desk-based conceptual research and empirical insights from an in-country study conducted in Indonesia in 2014–2015 investigating the impacts of the global United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD+) mitigation programme on customary communities, women specifically at the local project level. That is, ‘maladaptation could be defined as a result of an intentional adaptation [mitigation] policy or measure directly increasing vulnerability for the targeted and/or external actors(s), and/or eroding preconditions for sustainable development by directly increasing society’s vulnerability’ (Juhola et al. 2016, p. 2649). While all three definitions ‘acknowledge that maladaptation occurs when there are negative feedbacks that increase vulnerability’ (Juhola et al. 2016), and all present typologies or frameworks to operationalise maladaptation emerging from adaptation actions, measures and/or policies, these frameworks for assessing maladaptation are exclusive to adaptation actions and not mitigation – the other side of the policy coin in climate change solutions that is explored herein.

This book then applies the maladaptation schemata, specifically Barnett and O’Neill’s (2010) typology to mitigation policy, the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and, in so doing, agrees with Work et al. (2019) who ‘take a critical approach to the concept of mitigation and invoke the term maladaptation to intervene into the persistent optimism of policy driven solutions’ (Mosse 2005, cited in Work et al. 2019, p. 51). Additionally, these authors in following Taylor (2015, cited in Work et al. 2019), ‘suggest that adaptation to climate change includes a broad array of institutional practices, discourses and policies and includes any and all activities created in the context of managing a changing climate (mitigation projects, for example)’ (Work et al. 2019, p. 51). This modification opens up and positions mitigation under the critical lens of maladaptation which, following a detailed analysis of the CDM, presents a range of alternative policies obscured in the status quo of neoliberal market environmentalism shaping existing climate change solutions, or what some have called ‘carbon capitalism’ (Maxton-Lee 2018, 2020; Osborne 2018). Indeed, the ‘gendered silent offset economy’ discussed in Chapter 5 emerges from and is rooted in the asymmetrical power relations central to ‘accumulation by decarbonisation’ (Bumpus & Liverman 2008). That is, carbon capitalism’s ‘new’ site of accumulation found in the solutions to climate change.

Key terms, concepts and their links to maladaptation: environmental migration, climate change solutions (adaptation and mitigation), gender and justice

The following pages in this conceptual overview introduce other key terms and concepts, in addition to maladaptation, as they are used, understood and interlinked in this book, including environmental migration, climate change solutions, gender and justice. Climate change solutions are messy, but what unites these concepts is embedded in the book’s key, macro-level question that shapes and defines its normative thrust: What is the basis of just adaptation and mitigation policies that can be adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) once these have been subsumed within a global carbon market framework? Adopting a dual methodological framework (Chapter 2) using desk-based conceptual research, underscored by a critical analytic method and supplemented with feminist qualitative research in Indonesia in 2014–2015, maladaptation is used as a conceptual intervention to critique the solutions to climate change, adaptation and mitigation policies directed under the UNFCCC, where the analysis shows that market solutions to climate change framed and ‘saturated in neoliberal ideas’ (Hall 2011, p. 23) are manufacturing maladaptation, thus giving rise to the injustice of maladaptation, addressed in the final chapter of this book.

The analysis of adaptation and mitigation shows the neoliberal framing of climate change projects is not dissimilar to past agrarian policies and ‘development-as-usual’ projects (Maxton-Lee 2018, 2020; Vigil 2015, 2018; Work et al. 2019); findings congruent with those found in the Indonesian study. The upshot of Chapter 4’s theoretical traverse in ‘Mitigation and the Kyoto CDM’ (and, which may serve as a cautionary warning for its successor, the new mitigation mechanism established under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC Paris Agreement 2015)), leaves us with an international crediting mechanism meant to mitigate, but distinguishes itself in leading to maladaptation through all five pathways.

Cames et al.’s (2016) comprehensive analysis of the CDM ‘suggests that the CDM still has fundamental flaws in terms of overall environmental integrity. It is likely that the large majority of the projects registered and CERs [Certified Emission Reductions] issued under the CDM are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions’ (Cames et al. 2016, p. 11). Lacking in both environmental integrity and sustainable development, the dual objectives of the CDM, gives rise to a more serious question of, ‘how then is adaptation to adapt to mitigation actions that have led to maladaptation?’ The circularity of this question looks suspiciously similar to Sir Crispin Tickell (in Lovelock 2006, p. xiii) when pointing out Lovelock’s summation of Gaia in a time of climate change: ‘we are currently trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. What happens in one place very soon affects what happens in others.’

Environmental migration

An early focal point of this book, now discarded in its end point only, envisaged maladaptation arising from climate change solutions as a specific and dynamic driver of environmentally induced migration, potentially worthy of its own category, alongside those defining environmentally induced migration and displacement (Bronen 2009; Morinière 2009).¹ As two of the anonymous reviewers for this book’s proposal correctly noted, ‘climate migration has reached a certain maturity as a field with pluralism in approaches’, while the other’s main point of concern centred on ‘the invention of (yet another) term for human mobility in an area of research rife with terminology: environmental migration/displacement, environmentally-induced migration/displacement, disaster displacement, climigration, trapped populations, and I am certain more terms that I have omitted here’. It was added that such a focal point could detract from the structural critique of climate change solutions leading to maladaptation this book makes.

In 2009, when research for this book began as a PhD thesis, a state-of-the-art literature overview on environmentally induced migration was published (Oliver-Smith & Shen 2009) outlining categories that, when tethered to Barnett and O’Neill’s (2010) maladaptation typology published the following year, exposed a gap in the environmental change and migration literature; namely, maladaptation arising from market-based climate change solutions, adaptation and mitigation policies under the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol, presenting as a potentially different driver of migration/displacement.

Early research was emerging showing ‘displacement linked to measures to mitigate or adapt to climate change. For example, biofuel projects and forest conservation could lead to displacement’ (Norwegian Refugee Council Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2007, cited in Kolmannskog 2009). Less than a decade later, Sarah Vigil’s (2015, 2018) research on land-grabbing and green-grabbing driven by two major climate change policies, biofuels and forest carbon projects, suggests ‘there is a need to move beyond the category of environmentally induced migration displacement in order to include the impacts of climate change mitigation policies as a factor that influences displacement outcomes or migratory decisions’ (Vigil 2015, p. 45). Later, she called for migration scholars ‘to broaden the spectrum of thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Conceptualising key terms and their links: Maladaptation, adaptation, mitigation, environmental migration, gender and justice
• 2. Methodology: Critical, conceptual and empirical issues
• 3. Adaptation, development, maladaptation: Theory and practice
• 4. Mitigation and the Kyoto CDM: Manufacturing maladaptation
• 5. ‘Silent offsets’ and feminist perspectives on women, climate change, UN-REDD+: Adapting to women
• 6. Findings of the Indonesian study
• 7. Where are the women?
• 8. Justice in the age of the Anthropocene: Reintegration as the fourth dimension of justice and the injustice of maladaptation
• Index