Climate Assemblages: Governing the vulnerable in a neoliberal era

Abstract

In late 2000s Cambodia something strange began to happen – foreigners could be seen in numerous rural provinces milling around organising villagers into community forestry groups and conducting workshops on climate change adaptation and resilience. A series of seemingly never ending workshops on climate change were conducted across the country and a stream of foreign experts came to Phnom Penh and beyond. A climate change bureaucracy was hastily constructed and money from Europe, the US, Japan and Australia began to flow. Over the last few decades Cambodians have been devastated by flood and drought events – in no small part due to the precarious nature of rural livelihoods. There is no doubt that the increasing frequency and severity of these events is a part of global climate change. Yet it is only in the last few years that government officials have taken an interest in climate change, and even more recently since NGOs have enthusiastically taken up the climate change cause. When looking at climate change programs in Cambodia it quickly becomes clear that they did not originate in Cambodia: terms such as ‘resilience’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘risk reduction’ did not come from Cambodia, nor are Cambodians financing these activities. Climate change programming has never specifically had Cambodians in mind; across the global south there has been a remarkable proliferation of western donor funded projects being done in the name of climate change, yet which all seem to employ the same concepts, terminologies and world views. This thesis attempts to come to terms with all of this by looking at climate change programming as part of a broader ‘assemblage’ that is now global in scope. This thesis holds that to understand why it is that experts flow into rural Cambodia and other countries in the global south (and not vice versa), it is crucial to examine how dominant approaches to climate change have been assembled – that is, the material process through which some approaches have been condensed into ‘global designs’ and which now travel across the world. Dominant approaches to climate change do not just come from anywhere. They were specifically assembled in Europe and North America and were shaped by experiences in those places and draw upon European concepts and world views. It should thus not be a surprise that terms such as “adaptation’ and “risk reduction” – which are now ubiquitous in the world of climate change programming - have colonial genealogies and owe a lot to the experiences of western civilisations attempting to assert dominance over tropical lands and people. So too, it should not be a surprise that the neoliberal revolution in North America has deeply shaped the contours of dominant approaches to climate change where climate change programming is becoming increasingly tangled up in western finance’s search for new fields of investment. This thesis briefly explores how a global climate change assemblage came into being and looks at the specific logics and rationalities that the assemblage has become fixated upon in the early 21st century. It argues that to understand climate change programming in Cambodia and elsewhere it is firstly important to appreciate how western liberal democracies have become obsessed with the question of governing over life (biopolitics) as well as the quest to open up environmental and social problems to specifically market approaches (neoliberalism). The second part of this thesis examines the messy and fraught process of actualising ‘global designs’ to solve climate change within contemporary Cambodia. This part of the thesis looks at how patronage politics, rural abandonment and militarisation challenge the orderliness of climate change programming. By examining two particular climate change projects (one adaptation and one mitigation), the thesis shows how the logics and rationalities of climate change programing were stretched to breaking point as they encountered the specificities of local geographies and histories. Yet one of the conclusions of this thesis is that global designs to address climate change do not actually depend upon local successes. Rather, the climate assemblage first and foremost prioritises its own expansion. Behind glossy brochures and optimistic meetings, it is often the case that the people who are supposedly at the centre of climate change programs – namely rural farmers, rarely experience substantial tangible benefits. Yet as the global climate assemblage trudges forward it continues neoliberal experiments throughout the global south which promise to be ever more participatory and effective. Now more than ever, critical scrutiny of the climate assemblage is urgently required – especially as the climate assemblage increasingly turns to resilience and financialisation rather than honest attempts to mutually assist those who disproportionately bear the burden of climate change.