Global Issues and Discourses References Revision

Du Toit, 2004

• In Ceres in Western Cape there are links between the livelihood operations of poor people, global integration, agro-food restructuring and the modernisation of paternalistic farming styles; the disadvantages caused by these processes are better captured by the notion of adverse incorporation to broader economic and social networks than social exclusion

• Ceres is a central of the deciduous fruit export industry where abundant resources should guarantee an adequate quality of life for those residing in the area; however, large portions of the population live in poor conditions and work for low wages, a paradox often attributed to a lack of appropriate organisation and the perceived deviance of the poor

• Attempts to tackle poverty are problematic as they ignore the views of those actually in poverty, but when explored it seems this low quality of life has been formed through the legacy of colonialism, modernising legal reforms and pressures placed in food production by globalisation

• This challenges mainstream discourses that it is social exclusion that is the main cause of poverty, but instead recentres debate to consider adverse incorporation whereby the poor become integrated into networks that marginalise them and the systematic dynamics of inequality, impoverishment and conflict at play

• This shows that integration and incorporation are not necessarily empowering, instead research and policy solutions should seek to engage with, challenge and enlarge the space for poor people’s agency

Leichenko & Silva, 2014

• Poverty is widely understood to be a key factor in increasing the risk of individuals and households to be harmed by climatic shocks and stresses, climate change is never seen as the cause of poverty but there are channels through which it may change and exacerbate it particularly in less developed countries through complex, multifaceted and context-specific processes

• Climate vulnerabilities, impacts and responses are deeply entangled within political, social and economic processes that create and perpetuate poverty; this is diverse in its impacts and often involves patterns of social exclusion 

• Poverty is a key factor in increasing vulnerability to climate change based on an ‘exposure’ component and a ‘social’ component; the poor have fewer assets to help them recover from shocks, their livelihoods are more likely to depend on climate sensitive sectors, they are likely to live in areas with high exposure, less likely to be insured and have less access to knowledge on adaptation

• Physical and psychological dimensions also shape vulnerability as the poor experience higher levels of illness, mental stress, shame, humiliation etc. that contribute to worse financial decision making and hinder their ability to escape poverty; lack of land ownership, options for livelihood diversification, lack of market access, degradation of resources, social isolation weak governance and inadequate infrastructure also increase vulnerability 

• Climate change also impacts poverty through food prices as changing conditions may affect agricultural productivity and therefore prices, this impacts the poor as they spend much of their income on food; for agricultural producers this also leads to a loss of income

• There are further indirect effects through an increased likelihood of extreme weather events affecting resource-based livelihoods, impacts to ecosystems, political instability, conflict, migration and slowed economic growth which can impact poverty rates and alleviation efforts

• Poverty alleviation is one of the most important strategies in reducing the impacts of climate change; however this is threatened by climate and must have strong governance of political and economic systems to uphold

Harriss-White, 2005

• Destitution is the most extreme form of poverty, the destitute are often considered ‘nonpeople’ and expelled from the state, market and civil society; this should be overcome by granting citizenship to the destitute and recognising them in the eyes of political elites

• The destitute are often referred to as ‘scavengers’ ‘asset-less’ etc., they are actively deprived of a voice and have nothing as they lose labour through forced unemployment, lose control and lose insurance mechanisms making them very vulnerable to accidents, illness and further economic shocks; this is conceived as an individual process

• This is not only an outcome of market change but also a lack of enfranchisement governed by perceived deviance from social norms such as cleanliness and health; this exclusion can be forcible from physical spaces but also moral as they are excluded from work, social protection and citizenship

• There are laws used to regulate destitution that have the effect of exacerbating and criminalising it e.g. in India vagrancy and beggary are crimes that can be prosecuted and people become forced into homelessness

• Lack of addresses disintitles people from identity cards, food security, social protection and are denied being a member of society; they must rely on solidarity and agency to survive

• The political system is limited in responding to destitution as the benefits system is not accessible without an address and is characterised by harsh eligibility based on stigma and social expulsion; there is a need for activist and collectivist responses to basic needs and to regrant agency and voices to the destitute as they currently rely on their own heavily constrained forms of agency to survive

Thomas et al., 2018

• The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world have exemplified the uneven impacts of climate change upon populations resulting from a range of social, economic, historical and political factors operating at multiple scales; this unequal exposure can be analysed through access to resources, governance, culture and knowledge to draw attention to the root cause of climate change threats

• Often scientific and technical approaches dominate studies of climate change vulnerability to leave underlying social drivers largely unaddressed, by understanding vulnerability as a multidimensional process on many scales positive interventions can be formed to reduce harm and mortality in socially vulnerable groups, minimise their exposure and sensitivity

• Access to resources, or the ability to derive benefits from resources, influences vulnerability by augmenting exposure, adaptive capacity etc. and can influence capital, assets, warning systems, housing, food, communication etc.

• The poorest suffer the greatest losses from climate-related disasters as there is a lack of economic, institutional or political capacities to respond or prepare 

• Vulnerability among poor households reflects limited wealth to prepare for climate impacts and limited institutional capacity to ensure disaster preparation exists in a form that is useful e.g. early warning and evacuation systems in response to flood and cyclones in Bangladesh were not useful in Dhaka’s informal settlements as households could not be notified due to their lack of legal title

• The built environment also plays a role as the poor tend to reside in less resistant housing, may live in poorly constructed buildings on floodplains or unstable hillslides making them vulnerable; this is linked to social power and gendered, racialised and classist regimes

• In order to successfully improve the vulnerability of the poor to climate change there should be stable partnerships between governments, social movements and organisations and effective engagements with the complex effects of climate change

Hickey & Bracking, 2005

• Chronic poverty is an inherently political problem and its persistence reflects institutionalisation of political norms, legitimisation within political discourse and the failure of the poorest groups to gain political representation as those who live in poverty are the least likely to be able to gain political representation and benefit from economic growth

• Representation is key to the politics of chronic poverty as the poor are most lacking in assets to exercise a political voice, direct participation may be seen as risky and time consuming 

• To move towards democratisation, good governance and human rights there has been an increased political space in which citizens can organise and seek representation to open up voices for the poor; there should also be a turn towards understanding the motives and capacities of actors who speak for others

• Political arenas are made up of norms, ideas and moral values shaped by how political discourses frame issues of poverty to create categories of the deserving and undeserving poor; these are produced from power relations that embed chronic poverty and should be depoliticised to move action away from a bias towards the ‘productive’ and ‘deserving’ poor rather than the poorest left with no protective measures; this was seen in Ugandan poetry reduction policies biased towards the ‘economically active’ poor 

• There is no singular form of representation that can best secure voice for the chronically poor but coalitions between different socio-economic actors are useful; there should be a focus on fairness, redistribution and justice that would allow for the active rejection of categorisations of the poor

Carter, 2008

• Poverty is most frequently measured and analysed in terms of income flows, streams of consumption and expenditures in ways that permit the calculation of indicators but do not reveal much about who the poor are, why they are poor or whether their situation is likely to change

• Information on the assets that underlie and generate income can help answer these questions and provide more comprehensive pictures of who the poor are and provide insights into the nature of pathways from poverty; this can also help develop durable antipoverty politics

• These asset based approaches were developed in the 1980s, and led to the development of relational approaches in the 1990s to expand the initial rejection of poverty as an individual condition and become more attentive to the systems of power, exclusion and social stigma at work in societies, nations and at the global scale

Bhambra, 2021

• There is a need for a historically informed, global analysis of inequality but this must be careful of reproducing a Eurocentral approach and instead being attentive to regimes of enslavement and colonialism that continue to have a lasting legacy in contemporary configurations of global inequality 

• Relationships between the coloniser and the colonised are significant in the production and reproduction of inequalities between countries and within them, without understanding these global colonial entanglements, it is not possible to put forward a credible future alternative to current inequalities

• The focus should remain on inequalities produced through colonialism, reparations for slavery, trade relations and coerced labour on colonial plantations

• The power of the modern state should not only be understood in terms of the exercise of power within a national territory, but instead it must be examined how European states extend their violence into other territories and other populations e.g. the colonial drain imposed in India from Britain draining a total of $45 trillion from Indian until the beginning of WW2, this sees India’s poverty connected to the process that made Britain wealthy 

• By only comparing nations in the present and assessing inequalities as a consequence of internal regimes is to misunderstand the processes that have generated global inequality, this should be a historical and transnational project of understanding ‘connected histories’ to form a postcolonial sociology that seeks to understand and address historic inequalities through a commitment to global redistributive justice

Crane et al., 2020

• Impoverishment is seen as a relation, an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political-economic injustice and socio-legal control with processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersecting with poverty politics today in a relationality that is key to understanding how poverty is produced and resisted

• Poverty can be re-politicised by critiquing normative liberal orders of poverty governance and by understanding that impoverishment is produced in and through the operation of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, racist property relations and instruments of Whiteness; this has been depoliticised though technical and oppressive forms of poverty governance 

• Racial capitalism and its forms of violent categorisation devalue many social lives through ongoing colonialism including Indigenous life, lands and livelihoods in a constant effort to enact racial banishment and create categorisations designating some as illegal and deportable and framing some as undeserving in a way that is often racialised 

• There should be attention paid to how racial capitalism has secured particular social, political and economic arrangements through aggressive policies, racial banishment and humiliation of those experiencing poverty; however the poor begin to challenge this by articulating radical ideas and solidarities through creative forms of survival and activism

• Racial banishment theorises the criminalisation and removal of urban residents, eviction, gentrification etc. that is foundational to securing Western supremacy in many different public and urban environments through pervasive anti-black processes to reproduce an aggressively white social order

• Everyday brilliance allows for embodied and everyday practices of possibility to challenge oppression through unthinkable politics on new horizons

Friend & Moench, 2015

• Urbanisation transforms socio-ecological systems in locations that are hazardous to exacerbate future climate risks in locations such as Asia and the Global South; this brings new dependence on complex infrastructures, technologies and institutional systems to create new drivers of poverty in urban areas that raise questions over what an urban future looks like and who can benefit

• Where poverty issues appear in urban climate resilience it is often in terms of reducing vulnerability of the poor to climate shocks and crises, but there is also a need to better address the structural causes of poverty and reshape urban systems to recognise the concept of rights, wellbeing and transformations of the political economy

• Urbanisation will be a critical arena in which the struggle to avoid climate change impacts play out as urban climate change will likely involve shocks on urban populations and economic assets

• In order to achieve resilience, there should be a consideration of what urban systems should look like, for whose benefit they should be shaped and by whom

Stanziani, 2017

• Inequality has been extended to integrate historical dynamics, economic analysis and public policy to highlight impacts on social balance and economic growth; this should involve attention to scales of inequality and how it plays out in different contexts around the world

• The nation must be questioned as a relevant unit for discussing inequality as it was not the nation, but rather the region, country, municipality and empire that played a central role in the relation between tax, inequality and economic growth e.g. the high levels of poverty in Asia and Africa are put down to the application of non-Western economic structures yet this is more likely resultant from colonialism 

• The importance of empire over the long term is important and this does not end when the empire falls and nation states arise, when empires collapsed, colonisers sought to maintain economic influence over colonies in terms of prices, taxation and traditional conditions

Carter & Barrett, 2006

• An asset-based approach to poverty makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted, persistent structural poverty from that which passes naturally with time due to systematic growth 

• This can identify poverty traps and long-term persistent poverty as well as contributing to persistent poverty reduction strategies

Said, 1979

• Edward Said’s theory is discourse is useful in applications to governance that upholds poverty as it reveals how social elites and government officials have produced and embedded narratives to legitimise the banishment of the poorest in society

United Nations, 2025

• In 2025 the UN estimated that globally 808 million people were living in extreme poverty, equating to 9.9% of the world’s population

• This sees 1 in 10 people’s lives defined by a struggle to survive in a state of economic uncertainty, only exacerbated by the impacts of climate shocks, pandemics and fiscal instabilities

• The magnitude of this figure and the reality that in some nations extreme poverty continues to rise demands a deeper analysis of the condition

Barrientos, 2011

• Since 2000 social protection has emerged as a key policy framework to address poverty and vulnerability in developing countries with international organisations and national governments escalating the number and coverage of social protection programmes they support

• Social protection is associated with a range of public institutions, norms and programmes aimed at protecting workers and households from threats to basic living standards through social insurance, social assistance and labour market regulation; this attempts to reduce poverty and provide support to the poorest including strengthening their agency 

• This attempts to address poverty as multidimensional and vulnerability as temporal as it measures the probability that individuals, households or communities will fall into poverty in the future by maintaining basic levels of consumption and access to services through income transfers, cash transfers and poverty reduction programmes that can be conditional 

• There are issues in expanding social protection in developing countries including financing, capacity constraints and measuring/providing objectives for expenditure; these may be helped by international aid

Ballard, 2012

• Since the mid-1990s a number of governments in the global South have instituted programmes to provide regular cash grants to poor people to reduce poverty, allow children to be educated and vaccinated, and the poor to gain access to employment and a regular income; these place an emphasis on liberalised economic growth and biopolitical inventions for the poor

• Cash transfers emerge as an instrument for encouraging the development of the poor by attempting to increase their entrepreneurial power to reorient the poor to take responsibility for their own development in a form of politics

• These transfers often attach conditions to force recipients to ‘earn’ their grant by keeping children in school, having them vaccinated, improving their education, health and civic responsibility to allow populations to advance themselves in the long term; this works as a form of governmentality enabling authorities to shape the conduct of the poor by placing expectations on poor households that they will find routes out of poverty by making good choices leading them to becoming more capable of earning income

• Although social protection has led to income inequality falling, poverty falling, household consumption improving alongside school attendance and nutrition; there may be issues as the outcomes of liberal paternalism see schools and health services overcrowded and understaffed due to a lack of budgets for services

• Grant conditions may also undermine gender empowerment as they affirm traditional divisions of labour and responsibility such as motherhood as women have to jump through hoops to access benefits in ways that essentialise gendered roles of caring 

• This sees a passive revolution take place where top-down responses seek to attend to bottom-up demands so existing elites can manage the inclusion of marginalised groups rather than lose control, this undermines the political influence of the poor and instead see cash transfers become a site of biopolitical struggle

Alinsunurin, 2021

• Conditional cash transfers are seen as a form of governmentality that can produce gendered social practices within households to impact women’s position in the home and the community in line with patriarchal ideas, this undermines gendered empowerment 

• As the government becomes a lived and embodied experience through CCTs there are gendered effects on the division of labour and order in the household in the private sphere as outcomes related to education and health are often seen as a reflection of responsible motherhood seeing women’s identities reconstructed through their role in the household related to programme conditions

• Conditional cash transfers were expanded in the Philippines under the 4Ps in 2008 and by 2018 around 4.5 million households benefited from attempts to break intergenerational poverty through the provision of cash contingent on health and education monitored for compliance

• There is an uneven burden on women to maintain their participation in the programme as they attempt to send their children to school and receive grants, but to do so must take on extra responsibilities such as attending the FDS with 1/2 hours of training per month on subjects such as governing household finances, responsible parenting, health and hygiene etc.; the women were keen to take on these behaviours with the belief it would help them and their households achieve their aims, as well as being responsible for policing the actions of their family members such as husbands drinking 

• There is a technology of responsibilisation as mothers were expected to support their children’s education and health through taking on extra domestic work in the household with little help from their husbands

Garmany, 2016

• In NE Brazil there lies one of the world’s largest territorial disputes, yet one of the key concerns here is around the difficulty in administering Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfers in the politically and geographically ambiguous region; the application of this has stark led to political geographic changes in Ponta Fina as a result of state presence

• There is a form of governmentality operating through the PBF card as individuals must come in person to local bank branches each month to pick up their allowance, this sees bodies pinned down at certain times and in certain locations, presenting themselves to state apparatus and with behaviours induced by the scheme leading to a more compliant and productive society; residents also see changes in behaviour such as health checkups, pre and post natal counselling, access to prescriptions and children attending school

• However, there are limits in accessing resources and establishing links for the government due to the border dispute bouncing residents back and forth between municipal services and spending to local governments not being spent on intended purposes due to political corruption with the result of poorly delivered public works projects and feelings of state neglect; here CCT is undermined by state actors and the day to day practices of CCT recipients and administrators

• PBF has led to geographic change in the Porta Fina area such as grown in the formal economy in towns with local bank branches, growth in profits for formal grocery store owners, tactics to expand territories, migration and transportation networks seeing an intensification of the neoliberal state in controlling and regulating space and activities

• Yet CCTs may not always produce what they aimed to accomplish as populations fail to reproduce neoliberal ideologies in predictable ways; in Porta Fina employment in low paying jobs has fallen due to the poor being less willing to work certain jobs than they might have been when desperate and experiencing extreme poverty; others reduce their time in waged labour to spend more time in informal work such as farming, care giving, constructing and teaching as they perceived these to have more importance to the community and bolster their social prospects further than neoliberal discourses of profit maximisation and improvement in the formal economy

• Residents now have more control over their labour due to no longer being in extreme poverty, using PBF to distance themselves from neoliberal policies and practices to favour subsistence over private ownership and employment upward mobility 

• There is also a rise in alternative economies in Ponta Fina as residents exchange debit card benefits into more desirable commodities in informal markets, as well as a rise in non-capitalist exchange and informal production to show the contradictory outcomes of CCTs

Hickey, 2009

• There is a need within international development to integrate a stronger political perspective into protecting the poorest, yet this engagement with the politics that promote poverty remains limited within the agenda of liberalism and international development agencies, there remains a focus on ideology rather than evidence 

• The examination of successful social protection suggests political modes preferred deeply political processes such as re-embedding capitalism and extending social contracts to marginal groups; deeper forms of political economy and political geography are required to capture the politics of reaching the poorest groups and extending the social contract between states and citizens

• International development agencies such as the World Bank continually adopt technocratic and universalising ways to engage with poor countries that obscure the essentially political character of many development problems and the local and national political processes leading to uneven development, there is a need to take poverty and politics seriously as part of a broader shift from narrow neoliberalism focused development thinking and practices

• Such agencies understand pro-poor politics within an idealised view of how politics works in poor countries based on Western claims to universal knowledge; this continues expert-led depoliticising tendencies in addressing poverty 

• There is a need to better engagement with political realities in the developing world and work away from ‘protecting’ the poor to empowering them as citizens with rights

Siddiqi, 2017

• The Pakistani state has made significant advances in formalising and universaling citizenship through the digitisation of citizenship numbers, this was used to reach out to citizens in the aftermath of large-scale flooding in 2010/11 with a universal cash transfer programme instituted for disaster-affected households using citizenship numbers to identify and provide ATM cards to those in the worst affected regions

• This formed a political space for novel interactions between the state and citizens to form a new ‘disaster citizenship’ in the region through progressive disaster response policy through the critical ID regime

• Disasters are perceived as tipping points for political change, but more often lead to unrest than peace; however, after flooding in Pakistan the state framed disaster relief as a moral obligation and linked the response directly to ID cards which people understood as defining features of their citizenship; this transfer was progressive, universal and direct to help people and state officials construct this as a right of citizenship

• The wider political climate here resulted in people demanding more of the newly democratic state that had reached out in an unprecedented way to citizens; a new state-citizen relation was formed in a country historically seen to be doing little to foster bonds of citizenship among its people

• This illustrated a shift to a more rights based citizenship linked to the widespread coverage of citizenship numbers through ID documents, this may extend rights beyond Pakistan to other temporal and spatial scales; the Pakistani people were able to assert and form a new citizenship through social protection policy

Bankoff, 2002

• Natural disasters have caught the attention of the Western media and are having a growing impact on human populations and societies, mitigation techniques are linked to historical discursive frameworks in which hazards are presented and imagined based on cultural values of the Western ‘us’ and the equatorial ‘them’

• In the C18th and C19th European encounter with equatorial regions intensified due to the slave trade, plantationism and colonialism leading to a growth in European deaths attributed to dangerous conditions of warm climates, unrelenting weather, violent landscapes, dangerous wildlife and deadly diease to invest a discourse of tropicality that others the tropical environment and defined equatorial regions of zones of danger that should be treated through the application of Western medicine

• The discourse of development in the early C20th conveyed a similar essentialising sense of otherness as tropicality as it conceived the Global South as backwards and underdeveloped; lifestyles and values were seen as in need of Western investment and aid

• The concept of vulnerability reinvents these discourses in a temporally appropriate manner to see the Global South as unsafe due to a lack of scientific prediction, engineering preparedness and management of hazards therefore requiring technocratic solutions from the Western safe zone

• Western discourse on disasters remains a socio-cultural construct that depicts large parts of the world as more dangerous and allows for the continuation of Western imperialism and cultural authority; unmasking this is key to allowing for more attention to be paid to non-Western knowledge and local management practices and breaking free from concepts rendering half of the world unsafe for many years

Gibb, 2018

• A structural understanding of vulnerability seeks to examine the system of internal relations that are in the process of being structured, this refers to institutions, power and historical factors that create inequalities and make groups more vulnerable than others

• This perspective focuses on everyday social interactions and structures embedded in broader historical circumstances that ultimately determine the nature, causes and consequences of a disaster driven by economic, social and political influences in specific spatialities as evidences in the Philippines 2004 typhoons, landslides and floods

• Vulnerability is related to disaster through the process of marginalisation were certain people are excluded in terms of resources, geographies or political representation leading to adverse exposure to hazards stemming from class, gender, race, ethnicity, age, health etc. as seen in the Hurricane Katrina 2005 adverse effect on African-American neighbourhoods

• Structural vulnerability is a multidimensional paradigm linked to historical changes and marginalisation that can aid in understanding the production of hazards and formulating solutions; however, this is criticised for going too far in emphasising human factors, measures and being rooted in Western ideologies and hegemony to continue to justify particular politics

Cutter et al., 2003

• Social vulnerabilities are largely ignored due to difficulties in quantifying them; however, these are useful in identifying social conditions that shape the susceptibility of groups and individuals to harm and governs their ability to respond as situated in a place

• The hazards of place model sees a risk interact with mitigation potential to produce hazard potential moderated by a geographical filter and the social fabric of the place including measures of community, economic development, demography and housing characteristics to see social and biophysical vulnerabilities interact to produce the overall place vulnerability  

• Major factors influencing social vulnerability include lack of access to resources, limited access to political power and representation, social capital, beliefs and customs, building stock and age, frail individuals, type/density of infrastructure are lifelines; this can also include age, gender, race, socioeconomic status or special needs populations, immigrants, the homeless, tourists etc.; these can be scored and placed into a model to produce a social vulnerability index score for a place

• Social vulnerability is a multidimensional concept that helps to identify characteristics and experiences of individuals and communities that impact their ability to respond to and recover from environmental hazards; this can be coupled with hazard frequency and loss data to examine individual factors, help improve hazard assessments and justify selective targeting of communities for mitigation based on social science

Bonilla, 2020

• Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico shows how events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and political/economic crisis deepen the impact of long-existing racial and colonial histories, this leads to state subjugation yet perhaps allows for new autonomous organisations, new sovereignties and postcolonial modes of recovery

• In September 2017 two back to back hurricanes hit Puerto Rico and caused unprecedented damage leading to a lack of electricity for nearly a year, a deepening fiscal crisis and massive social change as a result of the colonial status and relationship to the US; this exposed decades of structural violence and Puerto Rico as a place of US racialised neglect similar to New Orleans or Detroit

• The disaster led to a temporal rupture in the wake of emergency as the communities waited for aid, but instead there was deterioration, degradation and the forced act of waiting; even when aid did eventually come it was insufficient leading to the landscape two years later still unchanged with buildings shattered, cables unrecovered and public lighting out of service

• This state abandonment is placed in a wider climate of racialised neglect and governance where black and brown bodies are rendered disposable and seen as second class citizens; the local government had also been subject to economic instability and infrastructural vulnerability before the Hurricane 

• It became an individual duty to prepare for natural disaster rather than a state responsibility, this led to a rise of community action with residents setting up community kitchens, cleaning up debris, placing tarps on houses and distributing solar lights on the margins of a colonial state; here a freedom project of self sufficiency and community care was used as a way of breaking away from US dependence with the Puerto Rican flag as a symbol of this independence

• This formed a new decolonising effort as well as sovereignties in diasporas as Puerto Rican communities abroad mobilised to send aid in the face of government failure; these communities all came together in a new hope against US abandonment

Nixon, 2011

• There is a need to rethink slow violence as the type of violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, that is delayed in its destruction and dispersed across time and space; it is typically not viewed as violence at all

• As violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate, explosive and is instantly visible, there is a lack of attention to slow violence that is incremental and accretive; this can take shape in terms of climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, deforestation, radioactive aftermath of wars, acidifying oceans and many other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes

• There is a representational obstacle that hinders our efforts to mobilise and act decisively against slow violence and the long dyings that are staggered; there should be new efforts to politically and emotionally strategically represent slow violence in the media to publicise stories of compounding, temporally dispersed and multiplying slow violences in a way that is equally cataclysmic to instantaneous, explosive violence

Branch, 2018

• The discourse of disaster can be shifted to devastation when dealing with the destructive consequences of climate change; there is a need to go beyond dichotomies of climate-change disaster discourses of future/past, global/local and natural/social to instead frame disasters as a produce of global climate change, conflict and violence as evidenced by Uganda

• Early 2017 saw droughts hit northern Uganda followed by extremely heavy rains in the middle of the year, these patterns are in part attributable to the effects of global warming yet their impacts are also tied up in multiscale, plural histories of environmental violence encompassing local, national and regional dynamics of conflict where political violence is continually bound up with environmental change

• In northern Uganda the Civil War raged from 1986-2006, this led to the forcible displacement of rural populations with over 1 million people in displacement camps to lead to cultural, economic and social distribution; this has interacted with climate disasters where the state’s lack of response is a continuation of state violence and political subjugation

• In the Ancholi sub-region of northern Uganda people returned from camps in 2005/6 to see radically changed settings and an unfamiliar landscape; a key part of this was the felling of large trees due to global demands for charcoal and timber products; this led to a decline in productivity, destruction of ecosystems, changes in weather patterns leading to increased rainfall and drought as well as disruption to livelihoods as the trees were key for building materials, firewood, grazing land, medical plants and spiritual values; the loss of the trees both caused and exacerbated the impact of climate change through histories and continuations of political violence 

• This shows that the drought in northern Uganda was not isolated, but part of a broader regime of the devastation of war as it was produced through changing climatic patterns but also by social forces of camps, war and the degradation of land; this was not purely local as the conflict was only possible due to support from international donors and the extraction of the trees was linked to political and economic interests; this formed a multiscalar natural and social violence

Siddiqi, 2011

• Social protection and climate change adaptation can be bought together through a sustainable livelihoods approach to provide a framework for income and livelihood supporting interventions in the face of climate change for vulnerable rural livelihoods

• Social protection has risen to the top of agendas for developing countries but it must be revisited as it may leave out ranges of vulnerable groups who stand to lose significant due to climatic changes as it can push people into poverty as well as the poor being most vulnerable 

• A key aim should be livelihood diversification where social protection interventions can be designed and implemented to diversify the rural poor’s income and include climate resilience agricultural and pastoral opportunities through seed fails and the introduction of new animals alongside wider legislative and institutional reforms to decrease the risks to small land owners e.g. diverse seed packs in Malawi

• Asset building and asset resilience is also key as climate change can damage assets, they should therefore be increased and protected through direct asset transfers or indirect interventions such as the provision of fodder, seeds or vaccinations to secure the capacity of farmers e.g. fodder factories in Mauritania

• Increased mobility provides people an exit strategy to leave risky areas and occupations, social protection can increase this through assisted migration programmes, housing subsidies, rent controls, cheaper services, legislative and political action and training programmes e.g. blacksmithing and masonry training in Sierra Leone

• This sees the scope of social protection revisited and reworked to include climate adaptation with new interventions needing to be dynamic and adaptable to the risks and dangers the poor face in maintaining their livelihoods in the face of climate change

Althor et al., 2016

• The most damaging and long lasting consequence of GHG emissions is not constrained to the border of the emitting country, but degrades the world’s common climate system with highly variable impacts on countries based on differential climate vulnerabilities

• There is a major climate inequality as free rider countries are able to contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions with limited vulnerability to effects, but forced rider countries are the most vulnerable but contribute little to the problem

• The countries least vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are generally the highest GHG emitters e.g. China, US and India but the most vulnerable contribute the least e.g. African countries and small island states in the Atlantic and Pacific; this is also linked to economic output as those using GHGs achieve economic growth through GHGs with few consequences in contrast to vulnerable, low economic growth countries facing severe climate impacts

• By 2030 climate change inequality will rise further and there is a need to enforce common but differentiated responsibility frameworks and improve climate financing as put forwards in the Paris Agreement

Sultana, 2022a

• Climate change has had unequal and uneven burdens across places with injustices laying bare fault lines of suffering across different sites and scales; climate justice pays attention to these unequal impacts of climate change and attempts to redress resultant inequalities in fair and equitable ways

• Critical climate justice uses solidarity and collective action alongside greater engagement with intersectional and international feminist scholarship to encourage impactful and accountable action

• This helps understand who benefits, loses, in what ways, where and why from climate change by integrating historical and geographical differences as colonialism, capitalism and globalisation have produced uneven climate injustices

• These injustices must be identified and underlying causes addressed through insights from many academic theories and grassroots activist movements that seek to expose the root causes of climate change, address and dismantle systematic issues by paying attention to space, place and scale alongside past injustices that cause disproportionate burdens on racialised post-colonial communities and the Global South

• Climate justice is the most effective when integrating diverse feminist perspectives critiquing the capitalist patriarchy, anti-racist and anti-colonial voices and the heterogeneity of vulnerable communities formed by interlocking systems of oppression

• This promotes inclusive planning and action beyond techno-managerial climate solutions to improve the lived experience and move away from victim narratives to resilience, care and commoning to bring about equitable system change

Sultana, 2022b

• There is a multiplicity and endlessness to the ways colonialism haunts the occupied, post-colonial and settler-colonial subjects due to embodied experiences of grief, trauma and resistance formed through the ongoing forms of racial domination and hierarchical power that constitute disproportionate climate vulnerabilities among racialised populations

• Ongoing climate coloniality is expressed through global racism, continued othering, dispossession and commodification, destruction, sacrifice zones and excessive exposure to harms in a local, embodied and lived experience stemming from historical colonial differences that compound in a slow violence that renders the lives and ecosystems of those in sacrifice zones disposable under racial logics of climate tragedies 

• Coloniality is experienced through ecological degradation through capitalism articulated development, global land and water grabs, REDD+, conservation, mining and deforestation that leads to domination, displacement, degradation and impoverishment at the hands of the Global North, transnational corporates and neoliberal governance

• The climate apartheid is used to show the socio-spatial differentiation of who pays for climate breakdown, who is expendable and who is spared manifested across different scales and existing through the intersectionality of race, gender and class

• This is also a problem of resource overexploitation leaving the Global South less capable of addressing climate impacts as a result of reduced state capacities, this is also discursively reproduced in global debate and homogenised climate knowledge valuing Western expertise, normalising technocratic management and extractivism in a material and epistemological site of struggle

• There is a need to decolonise climate and mainstream discourses by confronting and dismantling colonial ideologies, politicising climate and exposing structural racism to work towards reducing the heaviness of coloniality in the everyday

Liboiron, 2021

• Plastic pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism, but an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land, it is best understood as the violence of colonial land relations rather than environmental damage; it is colonialism that allows pollution to occur and entitlement to land that assimilates that pollution

• It has been assumed that plastic would be taken to landfills or recycling plants that allowed it to disappear, but this would not be possible without access to Indigenous Lands that act as a sink or a way to store waste; access to land is also assumed for cultural design, scientific research, construing pipelines etc. or imaging clean futures on Indigenous lands without permission or consent 

• Environmentalism also reproduces colonialism through environmental solutions to pollution such as building hydroelectrics dams as it assumes access to Indigenous Land and its ability to produce value for settler colonial desires and futures; these colonial land relations become inherited as common sense 

• Pollution, scientific ways to know pollution and actions to mitigate it are essential parts of the interlocking logic, mechanisms and structures of colonialism that allow it to produce and reproduce its effects; there are ways to approach more ethical land relations with methodologies as a key way to do this

Barnett, 2020

• Vulnerability to climate change is a matter of political economy, those who have agency in shaping it are able to shape choices of adaptation that benefit powerful institutions and interests by appropriating the cause of vulnerability, depoliticising it and promoting innovations in finance and markets as the solution

• The power to shape vulnerability allows political and economic institutions to sustain themselves and capitalise on opportunities presented by climate change at the expense of those most at risk

• The idea of vulnerability is embedded in discourses, doctrines, epistemologies and ideologies that move through borders and across social networks; it describes powerlessness, avoids structural causes, justifies the imposing of capitalist and colonial desires framed as fixes and feeds into catastrophism to reproduce power dynamics by failing to recognise the agency and humanity of those at risk

• Businesses, politics, communities and NGOs bring about these ideas of vulnerability and measures to reduce it to meet their own interests, it is political as actors stand to lose or gain politically and economically; this shapes adaptation such as building a sea wall rather than committing to resettlement as a less politically risky and economically viable response

Walker & Bulkeley, 2006

• Environmental justice has always been intensely geographical and has roots in grassroots activism in the US contesting proposals to site pollution and toxic facilities being built in predominantly black and poor communities; this began to ask questions of distribution of environmental harms, inequality and injustice related to pollution and toxicity and race and civil rights

• The movement has since evolved from grassroots US activist and become globalised, it has broadened in scope to encompass more sites, forms and processes of injustice; there is now a need to open it up beyond Western liberal analyses and become more applicable to post-colonial contexts, local and international scales

• At its roots, environmental justice is a social movement responding to perceived injustices in the distribution of environmental burdens for marginalised groups, this is related to everyday political struggles and has a concept of ecological justice in recognising relations between the social and natural world

• Although environmental justice seems to be captured within sustainable development, justice is often downplayed providing a need to refocus on this with greater diversity and plurality of meanings and principles of environmental justice

• There is a need to confront the underlying logics of inequality in multiple sites and geographical and political contexts

Bullard, 2018

• Many of the differences in environmental quality between black and white communities result from institutional racism influencing land use, enforcement of environmental regulation, industry facility sites and the locations where people live and work; environmental racism sees policies disadvantage communities on the basis of race to shift environmental harms to the black population while providing benefits to the white communities

• Environmental decision making mirrors the power of the dominant society at large leaving black people more likely to be exposed to environmental health risks due to higher air pollution, contaminated food and water, location of landfills, toxic-waste dumps and lead poisoning in children; this is combined with further factors of less access to health care or higher prevalence of asthma in African Americans to form compounded burdens

• The nation’s environmental laws, regulations and policies are also not uniformly applied seeing industrial pollution alongside government treatment differing for black communities; they are often the victims of land use decision making which is limited by the lack of inclusion of black and diverse voices in decision makers

• This forms the environmental apartheid where environmental policies limit the mobility, neighbourhood options, job opportunities and choices for millions of Americans on the basis of race which is now the most important factor in the location of abandoned toxic-waste sites; communities now become sacrifice zones

Bullard, 2018

• Environmental racism is seen in Louisiana playing into ideas of the South as a backward land where the colonial mentality sees local governments and large businesses take advantage of people who are politically and economically powerless; after the collapse of the sugar plantations in WW2 Louisiana became a prime location for petrochemical industries

• Petrochemical industries became the new masters and the Black, poor populations the victims of high chemical emissions, toxic release in water, oil spills, high cancer fatalities, infant mortality etc.; a key issue is the contamination of underground aquifers where the majority of the population source their drinking water, they must rely on bottled drinking water that is costly for low-income households

• The Lower Mississippi River industrial corridor contains 125 companies emitting huge amounts of toxic chemicals and has now been dubbed ‘cancer alley’ as a toxic sacrifice zone where the lives of the Black and poor communities are rendered expendable

Davies, 2019

• Toxic pollution is a form of violence that sees gradual brutalities of petrochemical infrastructures compound over time, this slow violence is connected to structural harms and inequalities as well as being caught up in epistemic violence where accounts allow slow violence to remain invisible and persist 

• Structural and slow violence are inextricably linked as institutionalised forms of racism, sexism and classism restrict quality of life but is also the bedrock from which slow violence can begin and propagate 

• Freetown is situated on the western banks of the Mississippi River and hosts the densest cluster of chemical facilities in the western hemisphere, the visibility of petrochemical infrastructures are perceived health risks have led it to be named ‘Cancer Alley’

• Here, residents observe the slow accumulation of pollution through impacts to the local area such as invasive chemical smells, stories of increased cancer rates, vegetation wilting, trees dying, wildlife disappearing or health issues such as headaches linked to chemical pollution; there is a stationary displacement as communities become stranded in local environments that gradually change to become uninhabitable

• This slow violence is a form of environmental racism as environmental risks are placed where there is the least resistance from poor and black communities in the area, this population was formed from the plantations located in Louisiana in the colonial era seeing current discriminatory geographies of pollution stemming from structural colonial histories

• Slow violence here is visible to the residents, but invisible to scientists and writers far removed and therefore not reported through an epistemic violence; this should be challenged by increasing representation of accounts of gradual violences to be more attentive to alternative perspective and knowledge claims in polluted spaces

Sze, 2017

• Environmental justice first stemmed from grassroots movements addressing the manner in which race and class are powerful determinants of environmental quality; however, gender is also a key factor here drawing attention to differential impacts of toxicities based on the intersections between factors including disability, age, immigration status etc.

• Women are often narrated as culturally acceptable, reproductive mothers taking apolitical stances; but this can be challenged through women's agency in environmental activism such as Gibbs in the Love Canal protest; this shows how gender can be expanded and broken down as homogenous to be taken more seriously as an intersectional category 

• There is a focus here in differential impacts on the body and how it relates to material systems, nature and chemicals; this can be related to toxic exposure, maternal and child health e.g. contamination of breast milk in Indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic 

• Women’s rights organisations around the world also stress how the changing environment shifts social reproduction and places further responsibility on women to maintain everyday life in changing conditions in a lived environmentalism

• Gender is therefore able to draw attention to new issues, frameworks and methodologies to acknowledge the intersection of gender, race and class

Davis, 2011

• In early Women’s Rights movements the influence of racism was unmistakable as white, native born, educated women were regarded as having far more compelling claims for suffrage than Black people and immigrants; this created a division with an army of refined and cultivated women on one side, and on the other a growing group of emancipated Africans

• There was little support for Black women in forming their own branch of the suffrage association due to fear that other white Southern members may withdraw if Black women were admitted, by the turn of the C20th the suffrage campaign began to accept white supremacy and champion a racist and class biased argument 

• This led to the subjugation of Black workers in the South to accept slavelike wages and working conditions; this was also tied up with imperialist expansion which exacerbated the plight of Black people and the US working class

• Overall argument is that American feminism has historically failed by focusing on the needs of white, middle-class women while ignoring how racism and economic class deeply shape the experiences of Black and working-class women; true liberation requires an intersectional approach and an appreciation that gender, race and class are part of interconnected systems of oppression

Dillon, 2014

• The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was abandoned by the US Navy in 1974 and is known to be a highly toxic place housing waste accumulated through industrial shipbuilding as well as radiological laboratory waste; it is now being redeveloped as a brownfield project that seeks to build private urban development, commercial spaces and a climate change think tank

• The old naval base and brownfield development is a site of violence and sometimes death as many African-Americans living in the area are subject to racial segregation, asthma and cancer due to the toxicity of the waste; these social and racial injustices are reproduced through redevelopment attempting to revitalise the spaces into those for capital accumulation

• Waste is a lens into social relations and social orders as wastelands are linked to uncultivated spaces with improper bodies and habitats, they are inseparable from race and racism as this shapes the waste-ability of urban space

• The new development has encouraged a new white residential population and creative class to replace the neighbourhood's industrial and racially marginalised community that was seen as an outer, different racial neighbourhood from the inner city and mainstream San Francisco to allow it to become a space for urban waste, toxic landfills etc.; here there was toxic air and a lack of jobs 

• The Navy represents the shipyard restoration as a story of scientific and environmental progress in an effort to avoid confronting the demands of the African-American residents that they take responsibility for the unequal effects of militarisation; the wave of progress is a tide of displacement for the original communities who are now removed through a similar human wasteable logic

Williams & Mawdsley, 2006

• Postcolonial patterns of government and governance in India affect the ends, means and representation of environmental justice through state reform, judiciary and public interest litigation and environmental social movements; India differs from the West in the ambitious but incomplete and contradictory nature of government intervention and the nature of the public sphere showing a need to reconsider assumptions of Western environmental justice for postcolonial contexts

• There is a question of the relevance of Western conceptions of environmental justice elsewhere in the world, they may not be appropriate to poorer countries where democratic norms of civil participation and non-discrimination do not exist

• The state is a key institution where struggles for environmental justice are articulated, it is formally democratic but often breaks its own regulations due to being dominated by economic and social elites who remain focused on economic growth at all costs, as well as the poor, women and lower castes being excluded from decision making and democratic upsurges

• This was seen in the management of forest areas through surveillance, yet this was perceived to have failed in the 1970s and led to social protest resulting in a participatory Joint Forest Management which is also flawed through a lack of political will, weak civil society organisations and the subordination of marginalised groups

• Although legislation is improved the state must be cautioned in a leading role as it often undermines its own local sustainable practices in favour of economic growth as well as policies lacking coherent objectives, poor identification and priorities and inappropriate methods and tools

• There are further differences in the judiciary, public interest litigation and social movements that challenge Western assumptions of homogenous public spheres and clear and reasonable enforcement mechanisms; this is proven to not be universal providing a case for environmental justice to refine its global reach and become more appropriate to non-Western contexts

Boyer, 2024

• In North East Houston, a community organisation is experimenting with building green infrastructures beginning with rain gardens to use civil power to defy white supremasist legacies of technopolitical flood control that have made NE Nouston one of the most heavily flooded parts of the city; this seeks to challenge the racist petrostate and the conditions of ecological emergency it created through solidarity with the land

• In NE Houston, the Black and relatively impoverished neighbourhoods face a higher flood risk due to clay like soils, the use of concrete and asphalt, the careless placement of highways and railyards and the toxic legacy of open drainage ditches that are improperly maintained in contrast to the private flood defences used in the affluent Western part of the city

• This slow violence of environmental racism sees NE Houston face a larger burden of flooding that is not met by state defences; instead they use civic water management through rain gardens where dugouts are formed to store stormwater; this is a new hydraulic citizenship of stormwater management that seeks to challenge infrastructural inequality and violence through citizenship and solidarity

• Toxic infrastructural legacies in these places create a sense of precarious environmental belonging that inspires expressions of civil power to reclaim and replace infrastructure though geosolidarity with the land and its capacities

• This has cascading impacts for years to come by achieving political solidarity and support for green politics, civil power here is used to disable dominant political infrastructures and form new belongings and futures

Munro, 2015

• After the Haitian earthquake of 2010, there was a provenance of ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ discourses in relation to the issue of corruption in Haiti’s political economy; this is problematised as it casts Haiti as an inevitably disastrous place, instead there is a need to engage with political, social and historical issues

• Disaster studies is a multidisciplinary area engaging with social, cultural, economic and political implications of disasters; this insists that the effects of disasters do not only come from the forces of nature, but also economic, social and cultural conditions in which many human communities exist 

• Notions of power and control are also fundamental for who controls information and can produce meaning 

• In Haiti, the dimension of race is critical as racial and class based conflicts have long shaped relations to and representations of land; urbanisation also causes huge numbers of slums in the city as a result of displacement and dispossession; there is widespread food insecurity and rioting in the slums alongside state indifference undermining the capacity of disaster narratives

• This informed a state of living in a permanent disaster that is felt individually, collectively, intimately and publicly

Carter et al., 2007

• Droughts, hurricanes and other environmental shocks punctuate the lives of the poor and vulnerable with disastrous direct impacts but also longer term effects of pushing households into poverty traps 

• Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras in 1998 and led to huge impacts to crop incomes with reduction of up to 40% and a 6% increase in poverty as low-income households lost capacity to generate earnings and uphold their livelihoods through productive asset loss and housing losses

• Growth differences after the hurricane were much lower for the poorest households due to a higher sensitivity to shocks and lesser ability to recover; the wealthiest households were able to rebuild over around 3 years but for the poorest poverty traps led to long lived, unequalising effects

• This can be used to inform policy and development to ensure productive safety nets are formed to keep vulnerable households from falling into poverty traps, this could include non-farming earning opportunities and accessibility of credit in the aftermath of a disaster

Tierney, 2018

• Disasters are often not conceptualised as social problems, and when they are this tend to focus on policy deficits; however, there is a need to understand the construction of disaster-related phenomena

• Little attention has been paid to how hazards and disasters are discursively framed and how their consequences are produced through institutional and elite action which can see harms shift and evolve 

• Disaster victimisation and the counting of death and injury are products of institutional processes which can render invisible deaths of racial, ethnic, migrant etc, groups as well as medical and bureaucratic procedures establishing how many people die

Bhattacharyya, 2017

• Key root causes of poverty in developing countries are seen in geography, colonial history, the slave trade, culture and technology; these historical matters have led to the falling behind of Africa, Latin America and other developing countries as historical factors matter for contemporary patterns of development across the globe

• A vast number of African slaves were captured by force and exchanged for imported European fire arms, growing demands and increases in prices led to the expansion of the African slave trade which weakened institutions and reduced socioeconomic development 

• In Angola and Benin, the heightening of the slave trade prevented state development, encouraged ethnic fractionalisation and weakened legal institutions to affect current economic development 

• Western Europe was also able to benefit from the transfer of seeds and agriculture technology from the East where they were planted in the Fertile Crescent to see large varieties of wheat and barley grow to fuel lifestyles, incomes and prevent disease

• There is a need to better integrate these factors to show how geography, society and policies have informed economic histories and economic presents

Banerjee et al., 2024

• Social protection programmes have become increasingly widespread in low and middle income countries through conditional cash transfers conditioning benefits on households making human capital investments in their children, this has expanded since COVID

• Designing programmes entails challenges in how to target social assistance as income is hard to observe due to many being in informal work or self-employed, showing standard frameworks from developed countries is not readily applicable

• Design must also be sensitive to different contexts in each developing country as agricultural productive asset provisioning is not useful in countries where people do not work in agriculture raising question on who to target and how to help them

• The rise of digital technology and mobile payment systems are changing the nature of social protection as manual systems are hard to monitor but the role out of digital smart cards authenticated through biometrics in India reduced payment delays, leakage and saw increased programme take up to lift more households out of poverty; digital vouchers were also effective 

• However, digitalisation may be a problem for those lacking digital access or literacy, in some places people prefer manual transfers and are less likely to engage with electric transfers e.g. Ghana

Gentilini & Omamo, 2011

• Programmatic issues include conditionality, targeting and transfer selection; these should be considered in future directions and the formation of increasingly context-specific models

• All countries have differing objectives, compositions, forms, scale and funding modalities allowing for different typologies to be applied in different contexts; cross-country lessons should inform how to introduce or expand social protection in countries challenged by crises, low-income and food insecurity 

• Social protection should also not be designed in isolation, but within broader consultations to inform decision making on prioritised within other sectors to build a politically and financially sustainable system; evidence should be used to test programme design, outcomes and effects to ensure decision making is accountable and transparent 

• It should be positioned to meet increasingly frequent and unpredictable shocks through the dispersal of technology and monitoring to form more effective and flexible programming in times of crisis; this should also be attuned to globalisation and the challenges of increased interconnectedness that can inspire modernisation of social protection