Planning with Climate Change? A Poststructuralist Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

This article calls for a stronger engagement by geographers with the concept of socionature as a vehicle for guiding adaptation thinking in development planning. Drawing on literatures from poststructuralist geographies, it argues for a relational, hybrid ontology of climate change adaptation grounded in multiple perspectives, knowledges, and more-than-human relations. Going beyond this stance, a framework based on the idea of planning with climate change is proposed for a revised approach to adaptation that calls for more-than-social planning practices embedded in radically more integrative planning processes and the redistribution of power across the climate and planning systems. The article ends by highlighting some of the key challenges that such a project faces for scholars working in the field of planning and development research. Key Words: climate change adaptation, development, human geography, planning, poststructuralist theory.

本文呼吁地理学家们以更积极的态度使用社会自然概念，在发展规划中引导适应性思维。它参考了后结构主义地理学的文献，基于不同的观点、知识和超越人类的关系，提出一个合理的综合性气候变化适应观点。在这种立场之上，本文创建了一个以根据气候变化进行规划的理念基础框架，提出了一种改进的适应方法，希望在更加一体化的规划过程中，更多融入超出社会的规划实践，重新分配在整个气候和规划体系中所投入的力量。本文最后着重强调对于计划和开发研究领域的学者们来说，该项目所面临的一些关键挑战。关键词：气候变化适应，发展，人文地理，规划，后结构主义理论。

Este artículo clama por un compromiso más fuerte de los geógrafos con el concepto de socionaturaleza, como vehículo que guíe el pensamiento de adaptación en la planificación del desarrollo. Basándome en las literaturas de las geografías posestructuralistas, arguyo en pro de una ontología relacional e híbrida de la adaptación al cambio climático con el apoyo de múltiples perspectivas, conocimientos y relaciones que trascienden lo humano. Yendo más allá de esta instancia, se propone un marco basado en la idea de planificar con cambio climático, a manera de un enfoque revisado de la adaptación que demanda prácticas de planificación más allá de lo social, incrustadas en procesos de planificación radicalmente más integrativos y en la redistribución de poder por encima de los sistemas del clima y la planificación. El artículo termina destacando algunos de los retos claves que enfrenta tal proyecto para eruditos que trabajan en el campo de la planificación y la investigación del desarrollo. Palabras clave: adaptación al cambio climático, desarrollo, geografía humana, planificación, teoría posestructuralista.

Acknowledgments

I warmly thank my thesis supervisor Professor N. Dendoncker (UNamur) and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggestions. This work also largely benefited from multiple conversations with Professor M. Pelling (King’s College London) and M. Garschagen (HNU-IEHS), who greatly influenced the orientation of my epistemological stance. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers during the session “Climate Change: Planning, Policy and Practice I: Role of the People.” All flaws remain my own.

Notes

  1 As Gregory (2009) suggested, geography can contribute to the study of nature–society relationships by focusing on process-based explanations and the ways outcomes and operation of processes differ from place to place. With its strong ability to conceive the Earth as a whole (Cosgrove 2001), especially with the recent advances in cartography and geographical information systems, geography additionally offers the possibilities to address one’s “sense of place” and value-centered conceptions of environmental issues (Harvey, Kwan, and Pavlovskaya 2005).

  2 Within the field of development studies, the word development broadly refers to “processes of social change” (Chari 2009, 155). Yet, as Tanner and Horn-Phathanothai (2014) discussed, development could have several different meanings. It can refer to a process, such as industrial development or modernization; a project, such as deliberate efforts to improve human well-being through policies, plans, and development initiatives; or a discourse, such as that of social progress. Meanwhile, development has a close connection with urban planning. At the level of the state, for instance, development plans are produced (e.g., physical development land-use plans) and expressly designed to guide the process of development and change in the sense of unfolding and working out how things should be in the future (Potter et al. 2008).

  3 That is a condition where the articulation of divergent and conflicting trajectories of development is replaced by a normative consensus around common humanity-wide action in face of pending environmental catastrophe (Swyngedouw 2014).

  4 Often conflated with postmodernity and postmodernism, poststructuralism, although always in the mix of these theoretical and cultural currents, is more contained, analytic, and philosophical (Woodard and Jones 2009). Poststructuralism was developed first in philosophy and later took hold in literary theory and criticism.

  5 In short, poststructuralism comes after structuralism. Yet, it should not be seen simply as opposed or simply as a clean break from structuralism, because some core concepts of the earlier structuralist theory remain, such as the idea that meaning is generated not by knowing individuals but by sets of sociocultural relations (Belsey 2002).

  6 As Law and Urry (2004) demonstrated, structuralism theory such as Marxism tends to produce geographies of highly structured sociospatial practices. Mobilizing metaphors such as the notion of levels, structuralist theory sees space as a surface configured by the play of underlying structures. Structuralist theory thus tends to “enact and produce a Euclidean reality of discrete entities of different sizes contained within discrete and very often homogeneous social spaces” (Law and Urry 2004, 398). Likewise, the geographies produced by structuralism tend to account for well-ordered, topographical spaces.

  7 This led to the development of a host of new approaches that spread across natural and social sciences (see Turner et al. 1990), including actor-network theory, agent-based modeling, nonrepresentational theory, and hybrid geographies (Whatmore 2002).

  8 As poststructuralists’ work on spatial practices highlighted, these limits to representation are derived ultimately by subjects’ and objects’ embodiment in space (and time), which is constituted by multiple encounters and interactions (Crang and Thrift 2000).

 9 According to Johnston (2009), systems are sets of elements organized so that each is either directly or indirectly interdependent on every other, usually in some form of network. Yet, structuration theory also considers systems as made of social structures and human subjects or individuals, which becomes useful when seeking to explain the conduct of social life and spatial formations through a dualistic integration of human agency and underlying structures.

10 Although these broad streams obviously carry their own sets of worldviews, paradigms, and assumptions, they are not exclusive to each other; their interactions have worked to frame the ways in which adaptation is understood and reproduced within contemporary geographies of climate change adaptation.

11 Particularly attractive to climate change research, it offered, for instance, an approach for integrating human and environmental elements into quantitative modeling of future scenarios under changing climatic conditions (Janssen et al. 2006).

12 Definition based on Adger et al.’s (2003) early, oft-quoted definition of adaptation: “The adjustment of a system to moderate impacts of climate change, to take advantages of new opportunities or to cope with the consequences” (192).

13 This argument joins Hewitt’s (1983) interpretation of calamity that made a comparable argument for “natural” hazards: A prehuman (first) nature was no longer responsible for hazards but, in fact, human social systems and discursive constructs were responsible for creating the material reality of hazards as well as our knowledge of those hazards as “unscheduled” or “accidental” interruptions of “normal” life.

14 In the wider social sciences, theoretical or philosophical explorations of hybridity are mainly associated with a body of works such as science and technology studies and posthumanist politics (e.g., Latour 1993). In geography, hybridity invites new ways of traveling that are beginning to make their mark in the field (see, e.g., Bingham 1996; Murdoch 1997; Hinchliffe 2000; Whatmore 2002, 2003; Kwan 2004; Panelli 2010).

15 Within Hulme’s argument, the “purification” of climate points to the sterility of a purely physical reading of weather and climate through standardized meteorological measurements, arguing that the very construction of these universalized diagnostic indicators of change strips them of their constitutive human values and cultural meanings. This notion can be associated with what Latour (1993) identified as the purification of nature, which is constitutive of modernist dualisms. From the perspective of analyzing sociospatial practices, purification means considering spaces for nature and spaces for society (Murdoch 2006).

16 Agency is usually defined as “the ability of people to act” (Sharp 2009, 347) and regarded as emerging from consciously held intentions that result in observable effects in the human world. In Murdoch’s (2006) words, agency emerges from “an interaction between symbolic systems and localized practices of meaning generation” (6). Yet, taking a more-than-human account of this concept suggests broadening our understanding of agency to nonhumans. This involves considering the agency of a variety of entities as part of a functional collective (e.g., in actor-network theory) and viewing these as capable (or able to act) but not necessarily conscious agents.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an FRIA grant from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS).

Notes on contributors

Sébastien Dujardin

SÉBASTIEN DUJARDIN is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Namur, 5000 Namur, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests lie in sustainable development issues with a focus on climate change, urbanization processes, and adaptation strategies.