What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert-driven resilience enhancements in America's capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighbourhood-level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centring of DC's historical environmental and housing-related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with "climate"; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change.

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Abstract. This paper offers a historical examination of the ways in which advocacy strategies and tactics have shifted in relation to political opportunities, using a case study of a hydroelectric dam project in the Brazilian Amazon, known as the Belo Monte Dam. Drawing on over three decades of resistance by transnational activist coalitions, the paper looks at how new tactics and political alignments have altered the dynamics of activism and norm diffusion in Brazilian domestic environmental, human rights and development policies. The paper argues that current theories of norm diffusion inadequately explain backslides and tend to underestimate the complexity of domestic political alignments. The case adds political insight to our understanding of the relationship of transnational advocacy strategy to environmental and human rights political realities in Brazil.

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This article examines an urban centre in the heart of the First World through a critical development lens. It contends that traits of the Third World entail certain characteristics which remain consequential as axes of analysis for a variety of economic, political and geographic settings, including new applications in contexts that are typically excluded from the focus of international development practice and scholarship. The article discusses characteristics of 'third worldality' in relation to Washington DC. It posits that, despite being emblematic as a power centre, the city exhibits many of the characteristics of a Third World city. Highlighting disenfranchisement, socioeconomic inequality, and environmental health issues, the article reveals a paradox: underdevelopment in the heart of the 'developed' world. The article calls for greater recognition of the paradoxes of development theory and practice so as to confront persistent problems of orientalism and lack of selfreflexivity in the field of international development.Every autumn I teach a course for undergraduates called 'Third World Cities'. My students generally take the course just before or immediately after studying abroad in far-away places. They come into the course seeking to make sense of the troubling problems of under-development which they witnessed from an urban development perspective. The course offers students a chance to investigate problems of urban development around the world, but we use Washington DC as an empirical case to explore the topic. This proves jarring on a number of levels: the investigations do not conform to expectations of what constitute problems of the Third World and, moreover, it forces critical inquiry into places which are traditionally avoided by international development practitioners. This article aims to provoke development students, scholars and practitioners alike to critically examine the geographies of development, following calls for greater self-reflexivity from within the development field. In what ways might the field of development reconsider its focus, so that it might avoid falling into the pitfalls of 'othering' and misperceived problems of (and solutions to) poverty Eve Bratman is in the

Literature on conservation and land reform politics concentrates on how local actors are characterized dualistically as either environmental villains or heroes. Here I present three different frames as exemplary of the multiple narratives at stake as actors create environmental subjectivities in relation to political opportunity, based primarily on ethnographic field research in a case study of Projects for Sustainable Development (PDSs) located in the Transamazon highway region of the Brazilian Amazon. I argue that local identities are mediated by their shifting relationships with other interested actors. Through a historical analysis of different frames of identity and land use, I examine how and why representation struggles occurred and shifted, based upon the ways in which powerful actors took advantage of political opportunities. This led to indeterminate outcomes in different local struggles across the region. In the process, local voices were often undermined in favor of interests of more powerful outsiders. The political process through which such struggles occur yield geographically and socially uneven effects contingent upon key events and contestation from disparate groups.