Lived experiences and politics of maladaptation within global environmental governance of climate change in Southeast Asia
Convener: Dimas Dwi Laksmana
Co-convener: Yunita T. Winarto
This panel aims to analytically, critically, and reflexively engage with the “lived experience” of people in the margin of climate adaptation strategies amidst the proliferation of multistakeholder engagements promoted and implemented by state, non-state, and transnational actors. Particular focus is on experiences from Southeast Asia as a site of contested realities and of theorisation.
The lived experience here is understood as how the historization, knowing, and imagining of climate change are foundational to our understanding of the intricate linkages of nature, culture, science, politics and belief that shape climate change (Barnes & Dove, 2015;Crate & Nuttall, 2016). Lived experience provides insights on “micro-experiences of change” that are vital to our understanding of how responses to climate change involve dynamic relations between people’s experiences and knowledge of climate change.
Lived experience is put into conversation with multistakeholder engagements in environmental governance that the UN advocates as crucial to drive a much-needed system change in climate actions. Taking a governance perspective on climate change implies analysis of “the cross-border networks and power relations that determine how resources are differentially valued over time, what ecological knowledge becomes integrated into formal policy choices and who is included or excluded from environmental collaborations among spatially dispersed actors and institutions (Miller et al., 2022).”
This panel also foregrounds “maladaptation”, which we refer here as “actions, or inaction that may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, increased vulnerability to climate change, or diminished welfare, now or in the future” (Noble et al., 2014). This definition includes a broad range of human activities that increase GHG, inaction, and actions that aim to reduce the risk of climate change, however, worsen or create new conflicts that compromise the community’s capacity to adapt to climate change. Maladaptation is also intertwined with the roles of the state and non-state actors in the history of resource extraction and development (Work et al., 2023). Therefore, it is a contested terrain where differing interests, access to resources, trade-offs to livelihoods, and claims are inseparable from climate actions.
By foregrounding lived experience through different methodological approaches, this panel invites papers that explicitly address some of these (but not limited to) guiding questions:
1. How contextual and subjective insights on climate change have consequences on the way social researchers reflexively collaborate with multiple stakeholders to critique and support climate actions?
2. How the spatial and temporal dimensions of the subjects, objects, knowledge, and assumptions in climate change interventions highlight the exclusionary/inclusionary practice in climate governance?
3. What forms of resistance, negotiation, marginalization, and collaboration in climate change adaptation strategies exist in Southeast Asia?
4. Whose knowledge and experiences count in the maladaptive outcomes of climate actions?
We highly encourage reflexive and critical analysis that examines researchers’ positionality about the research subjects to highlight the uncomfortable spaces that participatory and ethnographic research tend to create, and people traverse through. We expect accepted panelists to submit 5000-word draft prior to the conference as we plan to submit a special issue proposal based on this panel.