I am currently working on three related projects concerned with climate change, development, and marketization, as outlined below. Please be in touch if you would like copies of any of the writing that appears on this page.
Conceptualizing climate change adaptationOver the past decade climate change adaptation has become an increasing concern for development institutions, practitioners, and policy-makers living and working in vulnerable locations, such as the low-lying atolls of Kiribati or disaster-prone Solomon Islands. Drawing form field research conducted in these islands, and with their development partners in the region, I examine the limits and contradictions of climate change adaptation projects and policies.
Using the critical conceptual tools of development and economic geography my research problematizes climate change adaptation from sites where the asymmetries of climate change are profound, and where the ‘promissory discourse’ of adaptation is insufficient to address climate impacts. Shifting away from questions of whether adaptation works, I question the discursive work and material manifestations of “the idea of climate change adaptation” in changing social, economic and political life, within adaptation assemblages. |
Related publications:
Webber S (2016) 'Climate Change Adaptation as a Growing Development Priority: Towards Critical Adaptation Scholarship' Geography Compass. 10: 401-413
Donner S and Webber S (2014) 'Climate change adaptation under uncertainty: Case study of sea level
rise in Kiribati' Sustainability Science. 9: 331-345
Webber S (2013) 'Performative vulnerability: Climate change adaptation policies and financing in Kiribati' Environment and Planning A. 45: 2717-2733.
Circulations of truth, capital, and policiesThis photo shows World Bank headquarters in Washington D.C.. Recently, the influential development propagator has recommitted itself to ending extreme poverty by 2030, as the photo indicates. Yet, the World Bank and other development organizations have been pursuing this goal - with little noticeable change - since their establishment at the end of the Second World War. With a concern for how this paradox and tension is negotiated, a second research theme examines how powerful development actors link truth to capital in forging hegemonic development regimes, and expanding development successes. In conversation with existing literature on the institutionalized management of poverty and underdevelopment and the formation of good development and adaptation subjectivities, this research problematizes the production and mobilization of “success”, which masks the contradictions and stoppages in the climate change adaptation and development enterprise. It also examines the 'scientization' of development through an increasing focus on randomized evaluations.
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Related publications:
Webber S (2015) 'Randomizing Development: Geography, economics, and the search for scientific rigour' Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 106(1): 36-52
Webber S (2015) 'Mobile adaptation and sticky experiments: Circulating ‘best practice’ and ‘lessons learned’ in climate change adaptation' Geographical Research 53(1): 26-38
Markets in/for climate changeThis new research project hopes to expand research about the geographies of marketization to consider climate change economies beyond carbon, by examining the commercialization of climate science for adaptation. Currently, public sector scientists in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and at international development and multilateral agencies, are increasingly interested in producing commercially viable climate services - useful packages of climate change information - as a salve for public science austerity and in order to encourage evidence-informed adaptation. I ask two questions of this growing movement: First, can, and how might, more useful climate knowledge help South East Asian cities adapt to climate change? Second, how does this commercialized regime of producing climatology urge science to work for capital? This critical approach seeks to understand how the promissory value of service provision is realized, or perhaps is not, and how state actors and logics are contradictorily enrolled in commercialization and neoliberalization.
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Webber S and Donner S (2017) 'Climate service warnings: cautions about commercializing climate science for adaptation in the developing world' WIREs Climate Change.
Donner S, Kandlikar M and Webber S (2016) 'Measuring and tracking the flow of climate change adaptation aid to the developing world' Environmental Research Letters. 11: 054006
Donner S, Kandlikar M and Webber S (2016) 'Measuring and tracking the flow of climate change adaptation aid to the developing world' Environmental Research Letters. 11: 054006