(Re)negotiating power to enhance resilience to climate change
Climate change and threats to food security pose grand challenges to our global society. Critical scholarship demonstrates the role that power plays in maintaining pervasive inequities and social differences that, in turn, determine who becomes resilient to climate threats and how, and who stays trapped in systemic vulnerabilities. These insights suggest that we have to explicitly address uneven power relations to enhance resilience and climate-resilient food systems, especially with, and for those members of society who remain marginalised and silenced. This is a daunting task.
This project will provide a novel and inclusive methodology to reducing threats to humanities in rural and urban settings, building on scholarship on ‘negotiating resilience in place’. Rather than expecting people to ‘be resilient’, we will examine how power structures and social norms are understood, contested, and negotiated, and how they facilitate or hinder resilience building. We will then assess how these deliberative spaces can be leveraged in the everyday lives of disenfranchised individuals and groups so that resilience and wellbeing for all become tangible, accessible, and lasting. We will first conduct a collaborative workshop to design methodologies inspired by participatory performance to make visible the hidden intersections between gender, agency, and power. Subsequently, we will test these methodologies through fieldwork across two sites, allowing for a comparative analysis of how social actors practice resilience in daily routines. Finally, we will identify and trial measures for overcoming uneven power relations that undermine just participation and equitable outcomes.
This project will offer crucial insights for climate change scholarship on resilience-in-the-making, larger grant proposals, and projects that support inclusive adaptive decisions among at-risk populations. Our team consists of inspiring scholars and practitioners committed to fighting for equity in climate change solutions and inclusive and robust research relationships between WUN member universities and other valued partners.
Climate change is now recognised as a global emergency. All societies will have to take urgent action to adapt and build resilience if they want to avoid unprecedented loss of lives and livelihoods. However, building or enhancing resilience is more difficult than it may appear. Critical scholarship highlights the roles of power, social difference, and agency in either strengthening or inhibiting people’s resilience to climate change. This means that the ways individuals, households, and communities share power in decision making around food and livelihood security determines which adaptation strategies are possible and for whom. New research leaves no doubt that limits to adaptation already exist.
We adopt the concept of ‘negotiated resilience’ to examine resilience as a complex process that requires negotiation between different people with diverse needs, interests, and aspirations. Specific norms regarding gender or age or marital status intersect to define social relations and hierarchies. They, in turn, influence who has a say in decision-making processes, in urban and rural communities in the Global South and Global North. Recent research illustrates how agency is negotiated in practice, including in the context of climate change. Such deliberations are vital for overcoming inequitable power dynamics, also in participatory interventions.
What remains unanswered is how these deliberative spaces can be anchored more effectively in the day-to-day lived experiences of struggling groups so that they last. Our research advances critical and engaged scholarship at the intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and climate change. We propose to design and test an innovative and inclusive methodological approach to practice negotiating and renegotiating resilience in rural and urban settings. The research will span geographic and cultural contexts, with a main focus on households and communities.
Drawing upon experiences from Ghana, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, South Africa, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, the UK, Indonesia, Thailand, New Zealand, and Oceania, we are acutely aware of the uneven power dynamics at work within and across these various contexts. At the same time, we are ideally positioned to prefigure the next scholarly wave on resilience building, and to contribute to fair societal transformation.