“You cannot contradict the engineer”: Disencounters of modern technology, climate change, and power in the Peruvian Andes (original) (raw)

Dreams of growth and fear of water crisis: the ambivalence of “progress” in the Majes-Siguas Irrigation Project, Peru

History and Anthropology, 2016

Examination of the distribution of climate vulnerability, water resources, and economic opportunities in a Peruvian watershed suggests that, rather than the concept of adaptation, a focus on political agency is important to highlight the creative and dynamic political action in local responses to climate change. Peasant farmers and herders in the Peruvian headwaters are among the most vulnerable to global warming, since they are the first to experience the changes in water supplies. Leaders in the highlands claim rights connected to a fluid ownership of water that is born in their territory and demand payments from the companies making money on this water based on the principles of reciprocity and justice. These demands are attempts at taking control of an uncertain future and as such are examples of political agency relating to climate change.

Climate Resilient Development and Discourse in the Peruvian Highlands

2019

This dissertation strives to rethink apolitical and ahistorical efforts for adapting to climate change in terms of a political struggle for survival in times of radical global environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork with agro-pastoralists of the Peruvian Andes, government officials and international NGO actors, this dissertation follows emergent climate-resilient discourse of rapid glacier retreat as it travels from global origins and articulates with local culture and indigenous ecologies in the Cordillera Blanca. Through this research, I offer a critical interpretive analysis of modern, capitalist and rationalist ways of knowing and planning for climate change, finding that such adaptation efforts in the Andes constitutes hegemonic, discursive practices that reproduce uneven geographies of power and subalternize “other” ways of knowing about, and responding to, climate change. This research probes questions of power and equity in multi-scalar adap...

Resisting, leveraging, and reworking climate change adaptation projects from below: placing adaptation in Ecuador's agrarian struggle

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2022

As climate change escalates, donors, international organizations, and state actors are implementing adaptation projectsEmbedded within these adaptation projects are imaginaries of rural resilience. These imaginaries, however, are contested by individuals and collectives targeted by such initiatives. In this article, we draw on Foucault's notion of counter conducts to understand how beneficiaries in Ecuador resist, leverage, and/or rework adaptation interventions and towards what end. We identified five counter conducts: (1) negotiating for control, (2) setting the terms for participation, (3) opting out, (4) subverting the discursive frame, and (5) leveraging longevity. We argue that these counter conducts are generative, enacting multi-scalar counter-hegemonic politics of agrarian transformation.

Harvesting water for the future: reciprocity and environmental justice in the politics of climate change in Peru

Latin American Perspectives, 2016

Examination of the distribution of climate vulnerability, water resources, and eco- nomic opportunities in a Peruvian watershed suggests that, rather than the concept of adaptation, a focus on political agency is important to highlight the creative and dynamic political action in local responses to climate change. Peasant farmers and herders in the Peruvian headwaters are among the most vulnerable to global warming, since they are the first to experience the changes in water supplies. Leaders in the highlands claim rights connected to a fluid ownership of water that is born in their territory and demand pay- ments from the companies making money on this water based on the principles of reciproc- ity and justice. These demands are attempts at taking control of an uncertain future and as such are examples of political agency relating to climate change.

The climate-development nexus: using climate voices to prepare adaptation initiatives in the Peruvian Andes

Climate and Development, 2018

What are the lessons from development practice that adaptation interventions can use to engage people? This paper tries to answer this question by reviewing field data on perceptions of environmental and climatic change in a Peruvian mountain community and discussing both the possibilities and the limitations of using local climate voices to prepare for climate change adaption. The data comprise two complementary household surveys. The first survey provides information on the community’s socio-economic situation while the second survey documents the villagers’ climate perception. The data reveal a paradox in the way the community understands global climate change. The villagers who live on the margin of the global world and belong to the poorest economic strata in Peru are deeply concerned about global climate change that is impacting their environment. Yet when locating the cause of climate change they point at their own community rather the industrialized world and suggest mitigation actions rather than adaptation initiatives as answer to the problems it entails. The paper suggests that in order to understand this paradox adaptation initiatives must both listen to the villagers’ climate perceptions and examine the socio-economic and discursive conditions that shape these perceptions and constrain their means of actions. It concludes that in order to support climate change adaptation in mountain communities the Peruvian State and other external organizations need to find the right balance between, on the one hand, engaging local climate voices and encouraging local participation and, on the other, recognizing their limitations and preparing for anticipatory adaption.

Lived realities : climate change, neoliberalism, and livelihood strategies on the southern altiplano of Bolivia

2017

This thesis examines the cumulative effects of climate change, neoliberal reform, resource extraction, and global quinoa demand and their implications for the livelihoods of villagers in the southern altiplano community of San Pedro de Condo, Bolivia. I argue that, due to their spatial and temporal overlap, the effects of these phenomena are mutually reinforcing and have together transformed the local environment, traditional knowledge of and relations to the environment, agricultural production, and livelihood strategies. I contend that in response to such transformations, Condeños have engaged in various strategic economic activities that have become increasingly articulated with and connected to the global political-economic system. This thesis presents significant contributions by analyzing climate change as part of a broader worldsystem, rather than in isolation, and thus avoids what Mike Hulme (2011) has called "climate reductionism". Finally, I have provided an extension onto the concept of "dispossession by accumulation" put forth by Tom Perreault (2012), by highlighting the effects of dispossession that climate change has in the community of Condo, therefore advocating for an expanded understanding of the analysis of dispossession and capital accumulation and the ways in which the natural environment is enrolled in such processes. vi

Governmentalities, hydrosocial territories & recognition politics: The making of objects and subjects for climate change adaptation in Ecuador

Geoforum, 2020

Adaptation to climate change has become a major policy and project focus for donors and governments globally. In this article, we provide insight into how adaptation projects mobilize distinct imaginaries and knowledge claims that create territories for intervention (the objects) as well as targeted populations (the subjects) to sustain them. Drawing on two emblematic climate change adaptation projects in Ecuador, we show how these objects and subjects are created through a knowledge production process that (a) creates a discursive climate change rationale; (b) sidesteps uncertainty related to climate change impacts; (c) fosters a circular citational practice that (self-)reinforces the project's expert knowledge; and (d) makes complex social variables com-mensurable based on the project's rationality, interests, and quantifiable indicators. The emerging hydrosocial territories 'in need of intervention' require subjects that inhabit, produce and reproduce these territories, in accordance with specific climate change discourses and practices. To manufacture and align these subjects, projects employ participatory practices that are informed by recognition politics aimed at disciplining participants toward particular identities and ways of thinking and acting. We analyze these distinct strategies as multiple governmentalities enacted through participatory adaptation projects seeking to produce specific climate change resilient hydrosocial territories and corresponding subjects.

Climate Change, Water Practices and Relational Worlds in the Andes

Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2016

Climate change translates into insecure water provision and produces new uncertainties for farmers and politicians in Colca Valley, Southern Peru. Anthropological studies of climate change have mainly focused on adaptation, resilience and so-called indigenous traditional knowledge. This article argues that a stronger ethnographic focus on material practices – including knowledge practices – can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of climate change effects, responses and forms of water management. The author aims to see responses to climate change as more than cultural representations, and therefore focuses on water practices and the realities that these practices make, as well as the relational webs of humans, environment, infrastructure and other-than-human beings. The article explores different practices that enact mul- tiple versions of water, and multiple – yet related and entangled – water worlds. The author suggests that this has implications for how we understand politics of climate and water: as tensions between singularizing practices and multiplicity.

Communicating the Inevitable: Climate Awareness, Climate Discord, and Climate Research in Peru's Highland Communities

Environmental Communication, 2020

The paper discusses how anthropology contributes to climate change research and communication. Building on theoretical works that highlight the cultural framing of communication it investigates the signs and symbols that a Peruvian highland community creates and the imaginaries and identities it generates to interpret and communicate climate change and its environmental impact. To explore the community’s communicative repertoire the paper explores three climate voices that illuminate the conflicting ways the global discourse on climate change impacts the community’s future visions. Arguing that anthropogenic climate change poses a new challenge to the communication of urgent public issues the paper asks: Should the communication discuss climate change as a matter-of-fact issue? Or should it present climate change as a cultural phenomenon that is acknowledged as an issue in dispute? The paper concludes that climate change research is a post-normal science that not only must engage a range of scholarly traditions and methods but also listen to the voices that are affected by climate change in the real world. It encourages climate change communicators to recognize that climate communication is a dialogical relation based on the mutual interests of its experts and its users in providing as well as receiving knowledge.

Atmospheric Politics: Negotiating Climate Change in the Bolivian Highlands

This dissertation examines the experiences of farmers and herders in the highlands of Bolivia’s central Andes, or Altiplano, as they face and respond to climate change and other environmental problems. This work is based on 12 months of fieldwork among Quechua- and Spanish-speaking people in a rural municipality called El Choro, located on the floodplain of the Desaguadero River and just north of Lake Poopó. Bolivia is already suffering impacts from climate change, including shifting precipitation patterns, such as floods and droughts that disrupt agriculture. The government of Evo Morales and the MAS party has positioned itself to be an international leader in the fight against climate change while also continuing to pursue wealth at the hands of high impact extractive industries such as hydrocarbons and minerals. This dissertation, then, is an attempt to take a closer view of one community that is simultaneously beset by the consequences of climate change and water pollution but also is presented with new opportunities for economic development and new investments by the government. I explore how environmental experiences and politics are entangled in different ways and the types of material and spatial linkages that refract politics through the changing environment and vice versa. I trace the spatial politics of climate change and other environmental transformations by focusing in on people’s daily experiences with environmental phenomena such as mud, floods, droughts, and lightning strikes. I draw on spatial theories, such as Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space as composed of a multiplicity of intersecting trajectories, and affect theory, especially Baruch Spinoza’s notion of bodies affecting other bodies by increasing or decreasing their capacity to act. I use these theories to draw out a conceptualization of what I call atmospheric politics, which emerge in the material interactions of daily life. I argue that atmospheric politics manifest in people’s day-to-day negotiations with their changing environments. These negotiations reflect mutual entanglement between people and environments that open to a multiplicity of possibilities, despite the grim futures prognosticated under climate change.