Daniel Murphy | University of Cincinnati (original) (raw)

Papers by Daniel Murphy

Landscape and Urban Planning, 2017

This paper critically examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of adaptation in climate change ... more This paper critically examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of adaptation in climate change science and explores how dynamic notions of 'place' elucidate novel ways of understanding community vulnerability and adaptation. Using data gathered from a narrative scenario-building process carried out among communities of the Big Hole Valley in Montana, the paper describes the role of 'place-making' and the 'politics of place' in shaping divergent future climate adaptation pathways. Drawing on a situated adaptation pathways framework and employing an iterative scenario building process, this article demonstrates how 'place' contextualizes future imagined trajectories of social and ecological change so that key impacts and decisions articulate as elements of place-making and place politics. By examining these key 'moments' of future change, participants illuminate the complex linkages between place and governance that are integral to understanding community adaptation and planning for an uncertain future. 'place' as a boundary concept tends to treat 'place' in apolitical, atemporal, and somewhat naïve ways, whereas pathways approaches tend to focus on technocratic and bureaucratic practices of decision-making in which certain views on place, particularly 'scientific' ones, are privileged. In this article, we argue that 'place' is not a salve but is helpful primarily because it can both situate and foreground often hidden politics of place, some of which might be incommensurable. A place

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023

Rural livelihoods worldwide are being transformed by the increasing financialization of agricultu... more Rural livelihoods worldwide are being transformed by the increasing financialization of agricultural production. Microlending and the deeper integration of production cycles in commodity markets are clearly at the vanguard of these transformations, but insurance and similar financial products have become a new frontier. Here, we explore index-based livestock insurance in Mongolia, where even in the face of disaster and worsening climatic conditions, herders have expressed limited interest in, and some outright rejection of, index insurance. Using a decade of ethnographic research, we explore herder perceptions of index insurance, its effects, and the contrast with local moral economies of mutual aid.

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2023

Society & Natural Resources, 2023

As climate change increasingly challenges the capacity of traditional decision-making modalities ... more As climate change increasingly challenges the capacity of traditional decision-making modalities to contend with mounting complexities and uncertainties, natural resource management agencies have increasingly turned to nontraditional modes of planning and decision-making such as 'futuring. Futuring methods, such as scenarios, have been increasingly utilized around the world. In the US, however, there has been a limited uptake of these tools across public land management and a preference for more traditional forecasting tools. This article explores some possibilities about why this is the case and aims to identify potential pathways forward. Drawing on 28 exploratory interviews with public land managers from the US Forest Service and others, a variety of benefits to scenario use were identified including: (1) mitigation of climate skepticism; (2) more robust capture of uncertainty, complexity, and the potential for surprise posed by climate change; and (3) potential for social learning. Barriers identified included: (1) difficulty in understanding the process, (2) bureaucratic concerns about time, staffing, and funding, and (3) a lack of an agency 'champion'. However, concerns about the epistemological and institutional fit of nontraditional planning and decision-making tools like scenario processes predominated across the interviews. Interviewees also identified what we call 'streamlining' and 'mainstreaming' as potential pathways to integrate scenario processes into planning and decision-making.

Changing Senses of Place: Navigating Global Challenges, 2021

Individual and Social Adaptations to Human Vulnerability, 2018

Journal of Forestry, 2013

Weather, Climate, and Society, 2015

American Ethnologist, 2019

This paper explores the emerging articulations between microfinance and livestock production cycl... more This paper explores the emerging articulations between microfinance and livestock production cycles among Mongolian pastoralists in contexts plagued by disaster and commodity market fluctuations. Ethnographic investigations of household production and vulnerability in two rural districts of eastern and western Mongolia demonstrates that both poor and wealthy households have become ensnared in a cashmere-debt cycle but that the bifurcation of livestock asset trajectories between large and small herds has also fostered diverse financial and herd management strategies that further exacerbate existing inequalities.

Mongolian pastoralists attempt to reduce dzud (disaster) risk and mitigate its impacts through a ... more Mongolian pastoralists attempt to reduce dzud (disaster) risk and mitigate its impacts through a variety of strategies including cross-boundary movement. This article explores a case study of cross-boundary movement among Mongolia pastoralists during a dzud disaster event in 2008, and how these movements were accomplished through negotiated formal 'winter otor contracts' as well as informal exchanges with administrators. Moreover, case studies of contract negotiation and exchange are discussed by situating them within local and scholarly debates about corruption in Mongolia. In doing so, the analysis highlights how both tensions between reciprocal ethics of mutual aid and hierarchical tendencies toward patronage shape the outcomes of movement in terms of herd loss and future pastoral viability.

Landscape & Urban Planning

A B S T R A C T This paper critically examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of adaptation in... more A B S T R A C T This paper critically examines the temporal and spatial dynamics of adaptation in climate change science and explores how dynamic notions of 'place' elucidate novel ways of understanding community vulnerability and adaptation. Using data gathered from a narrative scenario-building process carried out among communities of the Big Hole Valley in Montana, the paper describes the role of 'place-making' and the 'politics of place' in shaping divergent future climate adaptation pathways. Drawing on a situated adaptation pathways framework and employing an iterative scenario building process, this article demonstrates how 'place' contextualizes future imagined trajectories of social and ecological change so that key impacts and decisions articulate as elements of place-making and place politics. By examining these key 'moments' of future change, participants illuminate the complex linkages between place and governance that are integral to understanding community adaptation and planning for an uncertain future.

Human Organization

Current projections of future climate change foretell potentially transformative ecological chang... more Current projections of future climate change foretell potentially transformative ecological changes that threaten communities globally. Using two case studies from the United States Intermountain West, this article highlights the ways in which a better articulation between theory and methods in research design can generate proactive applied tools that enable locally grounded dialogue about the future, including key vulnerabilities and potential adaptive pathways. Moreover, anthropological knowledge and methods, we find, are well-suited to the complexities and uncertainties that surround future climate change. In this article, we outline a narrative-driven assessment methodology we call multi-scale, iterative scenario building (MISB) that adheres to four key principles: (1) meaningful integration of socioecological interactions, (2) engagement with uncertainty, (3) awareness and incorporation of dynamic spatial and temporal scales, and (4) inclusion of diverse knowledge(s) from both social and natural sciences as well as from communities, including skeptics and deniers. The research found that MISB illuminated the complex, relational nature of vulnerability and adaptation and provided significant insight into potential, and sometimes surprising, future conflicts, synergies, and opportunities. We also found that MISB engendered a deep appreciation among participants, even skeptics and deniers, about the numerous, multi-scaled feedbacks and path dependencies generated by interacting drivers of social and ecological change. In conclusion, we argue this approach provides substantial space for the reflexive learning needed to create the “critical emancipatory knowledge” required in the face of transformational threats like climate change, and as such, we suggest potential avenues to support planning and decision making in the face of uncertain futures.

National forests have been asked to assess how climate change will impact nearby human communitie... more National forests have been asked to assess how climate change will impact nearby human communities. To assist their thinking on this topic, we examine the concepts of social vulnerability and adaptive capacity with an emphasis on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. This analysis is designed to help researchers and decision-makers select appropriate research approaches suited to particular planning and management needs. We first explore key conceptual frameworks and theoretical divisions, including different definitions of vulnerability and adaptive capacity. We then focus on the different methods that have been used to assess vulnerability and adaptive capacity and their respective pros and cons. Finally, we present and discuss three case examples and their respective research approaches.

Agricultural producers may be particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, such as drought. To bet... more Agricultural producers may be particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, such as drought. To better understand how ranchers respond to ongoing drought and the relationship between climate change beliefs and drought adaptation, in-depth interviews with working ranchers were conducted. Ranchers described drought conditions as unprecedented and detailed the interacting impacts of drought and nonclimatic stressors. They viewed adaptation as critical and employed a wide range of responses to drought, but lack of financial resources, risks associated with change, local social norms, and optimism about future moisture created barriers to change. Most ranchers attributed drought to natural cycles and were skeptical about anthropogenic climate change. Many ranchers likened current drought conditions to past droughts, concluding that conditions would return to ''normal.'' A belief in natural cycles provided a sense of hope for some ranchers but felt immutable to others, reducing their sense of agency and efficacy. Taken together, climate skepticism, optimism about future conditions, lack of financial resources, and a limited sense of agency might be reducing investments in long-term adaptation. However, the relationship between climate change beliefs and adaptation action was not entirely clear, since the handful of ranchers adapting in anticipation of long-term drought were skeptical or uncertain about anthropogenic climate change. Further, most ranchers characterized adaptation as an individual endeavor and resisted government involvement in drought adaptation. In the context of climate skepticism and antigovernment sentiment, strategies to scale up adaptation efforts beyond the household will only succeed to the extent that they build on local norms and ideologies.

Public land management agencies have incarporated the concept af vulnerability into protocols for... more Public land management agencies have incarporated the concept af vulnerability into protocols for assessing and plonning for climate change impacts on public forests and grasslands. However, resource managers and planners have little guidance for how to address the social aspects of vulnerability in these assessments and plans. Failure to assess social vulnerability to climate change during management planning could compromise land management agencies' adaptation strategies as well os public support for these strategies. We provide a framework for understanding and assessing social vulnerability to climate change in US public lands contexts. We describe types of information that can be used in social vulnerability assessments and ways this information can he gathered. The practical informotion that we provide is intended to help resource managers and planners meet current policy requirements for assessing potential impacts of climate change across diverse local social and ecological conditions for which one-size-fits-ail approaches are nat likely to he useful.

Though global climate trends are well established and some places are experiencing substantial im... more Though global climate trends are well established and some places are experiencing substantial impacts already, there is still considerable uncertainty at the local level about the future implications of climate change. Even more problematic, climate change adaptation research and practice still confront widespread skepticism and denial of climate science, particularly in the US. In this short report we briefly describe how an ethnographically inspired method called "Multiscaled, Iterative Scenario-Building" (MISB) allowed us to find new pathways to engage communities in imagining futures under uncertainty and forge past politically-charged denial and skepticism towards adaptive engagement in the American Intermountain West.

This contribution explores the re-emergence of herding contracts amongst pastoralists in the neol... more This contribution explores the re-emergence of herding contracts amongst pastoralists in the neoliberalizing contexts of Uguumur, a small rural district in eastern Mongolia. Contrary to past research on hired herding, it is argued that clientage and herding employment are a result of a diverse array of causal factors including disaster and market integration, but, more importantly, are also a result of the way rural forms of social inequality have become both key nodes for the circulation of power and the negotiation and production of authority. As such, this paper aims to demonstrate how these emergent labor dynamics craft useable hegemonies of work and worthiness as frames of legitimacy in the 'age of the market'. Downloaded by [University of Cincinnati Libraries] at 08:32 12 February 2015 2 Daniel J. Murphy Downloaded by [University of Cincinnati Libraries] at 08:32 12 February 2015

Adaptation is situated within multiple, interacting social, political, and economic forces. Adapt... more Adaptation is situated within multiple, interacting social, political, and economic forces. Adaptation pathways envision adaptation as a continual pathway of change and response embedded within this broader sociopolitical context. Pathways emphasize that current decisions are both informed by past actions and shape the landscape of future options. This research examines how adaptation actors in Grand County, Colorado perceive adaptation in the context of environmental change and uncertainty. Grand County residents drew on experiences of past change to suggest they had a high capacity to respond to future change, in particular a significant outbreak of mountain pine beetle. While residents and land managers characterized adaptation as gradual and incremental, they also recognized the ways that powerful crossscale processes related to federal land management and water diversions challenged local adaptation. Further, Grand County residents identified multiple uncertainties in addition to those associated with climate projections, suggesting that addressing uncertainty extends beyond developing strategies robust across different climate scenarios. The challenges of uncertainty and cross-scale governance require more than increased adaptive capacity; they demand that we understand how local and extra-local structures shape the adaptation envelope that enables and constrains local decisions and implementation. Within this envelope, local actors pursue particular adaptation pathways and exercise agency to influence the structures shaping their options. Drawing on empirical insights, we argue that the concepts of pathways and envelopes together provide theoretical space for understanding the dynamic interplay between structure and agency in the context of adaptation.

Asset-based approaches in poverty research argue that trajectories of asset accumulation and decu... more Asset-based approaches in poverty research argue that trajectories of asset accumulation and decumulation in rural, agricultural livelihoods can be located in the connections between household asset endowments and exposure to shocks. Though these frameworks show that wealth and its "other," poverty, can be persistent over time, there is a critical lack in understanding the political and historical mechanisms of that persistence including the dynamic interaction between resource access, socioeconomic inequality, and risk management. In this article, I use contemporary and historical livestock data collected from rural pastoralists in Mongolia to demonstrate that asset dynamics are largely an effect of historical processes of dispossession and impoverishment, and the resulting unequal distribution of risks and resources, rather than a cause. As such, I argue that booms and busts in household herds must be seen through a kaleidoscope of emerging and shifting institutions where differences in endowments, entitlements, and risk exposure are filtered through local cultural politics. In conclusion, I argue that by contextualizing rather than eschewing asset-based approaches, researchers can uncover the politics of excess as a politics of access and shed light on the cultural and institutional foundations of wealth, surplus, and their "others."