Violent silence: framing out social causes of climate-related crises

ABSTRACT

Climate change is a problem of unimaginable scope and magnitude – in cause, implication and responsibility. Predominant and ostensibly scientific frames for evaluating climate-related loss and damage focus on the climate events as the primary cause. This approach clouds out and silences the many non-climatic, social and political-economic, causes of crises. Framing the social back in highlights a fuller range of causes and potential solutions. It is also contentious as it locates cause in decisions, policies and institutions – indicating responsibility and blame. Choosing a social and political-economic analytic has implications for action and ethics as it broadens response abilities and responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• vulnerability
• causality
• ethics
• morality

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Tom Bassett, Daniela P. G. Calmon, Timothy Forsyth, Alessandra Giannini, Ali Kaba, Prakash Kashwan, Christian Lund, Barbara Nakangu Bugembe, Joanne Pascale, Yukari Sekine and Matthew Turner, and two external reviewers, for their insightful constructive comments on this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 It is important to note that Sen’s analysis is based on a neoclassical notion that takes initial conditions (i.e. assets and endowments) as given – without tracing histories of where they came from (Ribot 1995, 2014). The other analysts I cite go further to locate the causes of crisis in the very causes of the distribution of those assets. As Fine (1997, 630) states, ‘the micro-foundations of the entitlement approach are to be rejected because of their inability to address satisfactorily the social relations and structures through which famines are fundamentally caused.’ Limits to entitlements approaches are not taken up in this article.

2 Sahlins (1972, 114) frames crises as revelatory, citing Firth (1959) who wrote of what a famine can ‘reveal.’

3 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse#learn-more.

4 Viewing hazards as ‘triggers’ rather than cause enables analysts to include the causes of the fragilities that enable hazards to result in damages. Watts (1991, 15) states, ‘Climate, “over-population” and war, while potentially significant as proximate or trigger factors, have been substantially discredited as primary factors.’ Fine (1997, 637) writes of ‘proximate events that trigger and distribute its [entitlement failure’s] incidence.’ Pelling (2003, 47) explains, ‘The challenge today is to integrate agency and structure in examinations of the production of vulnerability, in specific places, whilst also acknowledging the importance of physical systems in generating hazard that can trigger disaster.’ Wisner, Blaikie, and Cannon (2004, 61) point to how ‘ … most government agencies charged with such responsibilities as “environment,” “health and welfare” and “public safety” generally still deal with disasters as though they are equivalent to the hazards that trigger them.’ In an ‘aetiology of hunger,’ Nally (2011, 4) considers ‘droughts, floods, and crop failures are “trigger factors,” though not necessarily an “underlying cause,” of famine’ and quotes Arnold (1988) who says famines are ‘a symptom rather than a cause of social weakness.’ Temudo and Cabral (2021) also describe climate change as a trigger of rural conflict in Guinea Bissau. While all crisis can be explained by the vulnerabilities, a definitional matter, the stratification of damages is certainly a function of stratified vulnerabilities.

5 As Fine (1997, 635) observed ‘ … there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip when it comes to the access to, as opposed to the supply of, food.… ’

6 Of course, there is even causality in lies and misinformation (Badrinathan 2021).

7 Of course, responsibility is contentious too – as it is the contentious content of causality. ‘Responsibility is a contested site, with partisans of particular normative outlooks arguing for attributions of responsibility, while their opponents deny or reassign the attributions’ (Jamieson 2015, 36). ‘In the accountability field, our choice of words also informs broader narratives about the reasons for accountability failures. These “causal stories” are relevant for guiding action because they point the finger at who is responsible for specific problems’ (Fox 2022, 9 citing Stone 1989).

8 The very notion of ‘problem’ is inherently an ethical issue (Gardiner 2011, 20–21).

9 True for earthquakes too: ‘ … the case of people dying from earthquakes today would not warrant an analysis in terms of violence, but the day after tomorrow, when earthquakes may become avoidable, such deaths may be seen as the result of violence’ (Galtung 1969, 168–169).

10 Rooted in latin for a contract, pledge,or vow. https://etymologeek.com/eng/responsible. In this sense it is a fundamental element of social relations.

11 Weber (1968) viewed ‘legitimate’ (although he used multiple definitions) as that which is not resisted. So, one may not agree with a law, but one submits to it – often for reasons that have to do with subordination and an inability to resist a monopoly on violence – as that held by the state.

12 I include the ‘legal’ within moral judgment – as the legal is a codified form of mores. Actions are guided by law, custom and convention, or the ‘contracts’ of expectation established by one or more people – all of these create expectations.

13 Indeed, ‘There is no risk that can be described without reference to value’ (Giddens 1999, 5). Further, ‘Risk only exists when there are decisions to be taken … The idea of responsibility also presumes decisions. … someone takes a decision having discernable consequences’ (Giddens 1999, 8). The normative is always implicit.

14 I agree broadly with Jamieson (2015, 37) that '…moral responsibility encompasses “contributing to an outcome” or being “complicit in sustaining a state of affairs,” even if these are not causal notions.' But, would still, on the grounds of social contract, consider these notions ‘causal.’

15 Believing that cause is rooted in instinct, rather than will, Nietzsche (2003, 64) would disagree with this thesis, stating:

Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct of punishing and judging which seeks it. One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty.

For Nietzsche (2003), ‘free will’ is the invention of theologians as a means attributing discipline and punishment. Cause of events, in turn, is sought to comfort people by reducing the uncertainties of the unknown.

16 Bassett and Fogelman (2013) analyzed four IPCC reports and adaptation-focused articles in the scholarly journals Global Environmental Change, Climatic Change, Climate and Development, and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change. They state,

Our content analysis shows the dominance (70%) of ‘‘adjustment adaptation’’ approaches, which view climate impacts as the main source of vulnerability. A much smaller percentage (3%) of articles focus on the social roots of vulnerability and the necessity for political-economic change to achieve ‘transformative adaptation.’ A larger share (27%) locates risk in both society and the biophysical hazard.

17 Others writing on the origins of crisis have argued a more general set of Western occlusion via the reductionist sciences. de Castro (1952, 12) argued that

[t]he tremendous impact of scientific progress produced a fragmentation of culture and pulverized it into little grains of learning. Each scientific specialist seized his granule and turned it over and over beneath the powerful lens of his microscope, striving to penetrate its microcosm, with marvelous indifference to and towering ignorance of everything around him.

In Europe and the US, he continues, universities have created a ‘specialists’ civilization,’ ‘directed by men whose scientific outlook is rigorous but who suffer from deplorable cultural and political myopia.’ These are, following Ortega y Gasset (1940), quoted by de Castro, the ‘new barbarians – men ever more and more learned, and less and less cultured.’ Similarly, Margaret Somers (2008, 9), drawing on Foucault, speaks of social histories and causes of crisis as ‘ … subjugated knowledges,’ meaning ‘those ways of seeing and understanding the world which have been disqualified for their supposed lack of rigor or “scientificity,” those knowledges that have been present but which are often made invisible.’

18 Guldi and Armatage (2014, 83) point to many factors that militated a shallowing of history from the 1970s to 2000s. These factors pushed historians and other social scientists to stop writing for the policy makers as economists replaced them; science envy also steered social scientists toward modelling and ‘ … a focus on game theory and rational actors – … a retreat to individual and the abstract, not the collective and the concrete.’

19 Note this anthropomorphizing with human names like ‘Katrina.’ Perhaps this is part of directing blame to them – even before climate change – as if they were agential forces.

20 From Latin colere ‘tend, cultivate, inhabit’ (Oxford Languages online dictionary).

21 Giddens (1999, 3) places ‘the end of nature’ at the point when ‘ … we stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to us, and we started worrying more about what we have done to nature.’ This is part of our entry into what Ulrich Beck called ‘risk society.’

22 Latour’s (2004) and Bennett’s (2010) ‘destributive agency’ – a claim that all things and all acts are results of agency and that agency is thus everywhere – is a serious diversion from the quest for responsibility.

23 In some sense, the search for pure nature is like the search for a Garden of Eden – that time before knowledge (and attendant responsibility) that the Judeo-Christian tradition viewed as pure (Ribot 2018). This kind of search for purity too is an origin myth that has many dangerous (Nazi, Proud Boys …) implications we won’t delve into here (see Huq and Mochida 2018; Kashwan 2020). Nobody tainted us with knowledge – no God or serpent anointed us with insight.

24 Marx did not blur the distinction between humans and nature, but rather acknowledged interdependencies and embeddedness. These relations are material, as well as ideological, dialectics. They are not vague ‘assemblages’ or ‘actor-networks,’ but, rather causal recursive dialectical relations that we can observe and unpack. So, I do not understand how ‘identifying multi-species realities, where nature-society separations are dissolved into hybrid assemblages, can offer deeper insights into the realities of the Anthropocene’ (Borras et al. 2022, 3).

25 Except in a 'but-for' sense.

26 Giddens (1999) points out that

 … there doesn’t seem in fact to be a notion of risk in any traditional culture. The reason for this is that dangers are experienced as given. Either they come from God, or they come simply from a world which one takes for granted.

He goes on, advent of the idea of ‘risk’ is ‘ … bound up with the aspiration to control and particularly with the idea of controlling the future.’ Here hazard and danger are givens, risk is new – it is a preoccupation with the future. I would argue for a moral economy predicated on the realization that we generate our own dangers – and thus we are responsible for them; explaining the rise of insurance and the welfare state (Giddens 1999, 4). Giddens (1999, 8) calls this ‘manufactured risk,’ and argues ‘The transition from external to manufactured risk is bringing about a crisis of responsibility … .’

27 See Lemos and Boyd (2010) for an excellent discussion of ‘additionality’ politics.

28 I.e. Marx’s (1894) dead labor at work in machines and infrastructures, or John Locke’s (1960 [1689]), transformative labors by which we ‘own’ the sky – and owning it we are linked to its effects in the world. It is now ours. Being ours, we are also responsible for it, and all the externalities that are coming back to bite everyone.

29 There are many reasons to avoid a term like ‘Anthropocene’ (see Bauer and Ellis 2018; Castree 2014; Malm and Hornborg 2014; Davis et al. 2019). Nonetheless, I will use it at times to evoke the era in which we are living under a changing climate.

30 As de Sherbinin (2020) notes, ‘Social vulnerability is a function of the population’s sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, ethnicity, race, education, and major livelihoods, as well as its access to financial and other capitals and adaptive capacity.’ And, each of these indicators and proximate causes, has a chain of causality behind it – what might be called the structural and political-economic root causes.

31 When that hazard is on a human scale. But, even with extreme events, such as gigantic meteorites, one can simply say we are vulnerable in the face of meteorites as we do not have the protections.

32 Of course, a total destruction of earth by a meteorite could make preparation irrelevant. But, the effects will still be stratified. Presidents of powerful nations will probably blast off into space. Yes, it will be a bummer to die alone in space and watch the earth vanish, but the vulnerability will still be stratified – by have rocket ships and have not rocketships. In short, any human-scale crisis is stratified by vulnerabilities.

33 See Ribot (2011) for a critique of ‘adaptation.’

34 In their fabulous book, Patel and Moore (2017, 3) wrote that ‘taking capitalism seriously [means] understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relation between humans and the rest of nature.’

35 As Oliver-Smith (2013, 2) reminds us:

There is no cultural equivalent of the law of gravity. There is no social physics. Even our most basic biological realities are culturally framed and structured. Thus, market logics and structural constraints are ultimately cultural products, the outcome of decisions and choices made by people.

36 Another important nuance in the relation between hazard and vulnerability (the biophysical and social) is that crises triggered by hazards depend on vulnerabilities, but they also change vulnerabilities. Hazard, by triggering crisis, can change existing infrastructures and the availability of resources. Thus crises, still made possible by vulnerabilities, feed back into vulnerabilities in the face of subsequent events. See Turner et al. (2003a, 2003b), Turner 2010; Swift (1989) has called this a ratchetting down. Also see Horton et al. (2021, 1280) on how climate change can change the resource base. They aptly label these ‘habitability changes.’ In this sense, vulnerability can include the vulnerability to become more vulnerable – a kind of vulnerability trap. Yet the vulnerability to be made more vulnerable also has social causes. Also see Beymer-Farris, Bassett, and Bryceson 2012 on the recursive relation between social and biophysical factors.

37 As Jamieson (2015, 23) pragmatically suggests,

we should be pluralists about responsibility and shape whatever conceptions can help to explain, guide, and motivate our responses to climate change. His conceptions is forward looking and powerful. The sociodicy frame looks backward to understand causes so as to be able to identify them in the present and future. Histories matter and give us insight into the structures of vulnerability and the crises they enable.

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Jesse Ribot

Jesse Ribot studies local democracy, resource access and climate-related vulnerabilities in West Africa. He teaches environmental politics at American University; taught in Geography and Anthropology at University of Illinois; was a senior associate at the World Resources Institute; and taught in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He has held many fellowships and makes films, blows glass, pots and sculpts. See www.jesseribot.com.