Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s essay begins with an unlikely meeting between two groups—Israeli settlers and Palestinian village residents—who together opposed construction of a Palestinian Authority–run landfill in the central West Bank. Attention to this 2013 moment of infrastructure-in-the-making sheds light on another, conceptual alliance. On one end, “thing theorists” argue for an understanding of infrastructures’ nonhuman, agentive capacity to assemble disparate people, things, and institutions. On the other end, political commentators propose, as many did, that meetings like this one index “environmental citizenship” premised on the recognition of common responsibility for a vulnerable environment. Both suggest nature’s physical properties—e.g., aquifers’ vulnerability to toxic wastes—seemed to have brought sworn enemies together, thereby exceeding or bypassing politics. Instead, Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s essay analyzes objections in light of the bureaucratic, calculative devices that shaped them. These devices structure the terms according to which “environmental impacts” have been evaluated in the Occupied Territories since Oslo (ca. 1995). They reveal how entrenched forms of technocratic authority produced the effect of the environment as both an abstract “good” to be protected and as ontologically “insistent” on protection. While nature seemed to demand the need for infrastructural standards (with which the occupation authorities and objectors attempted to comply), it was the standards imposed by the military occupation’s bureaucratic apparatus that reproduced the appearance of the environment as distinct from, and vulnerable to, human practice. Among some objectors, this catalyzed a need to perform what Stamatopoulou-Robbins calls “sincere environmentalism.” Doing so was aimed at avoiding accusations of “greenwashing,” which sees “false” environmentalisms as covers for politics.
Drawing on fieldwork in the West Bank (2007–2016) with engineers building sewage infrastructures for the would-be Palestinian state, I make a three-pronged argument. First, I argue that “failure to build” is its own thick, disorienting, and molasses-like condition. It is also “choppy”: it has a disjointed, jerky, quality that is inconstant and unsettling as if one is at sea without a lifeboat. It is limited neither to short-term, tactical governance—a governmentality looking to survive in the short term—nor to strategically planning for the future. It combines the durability of the temporary with the fragility of the future. Second, I propose that the failure-to-build temporality is structured by and structures the intersection of two phenomena: nonsovereignty, for example but not only in settler colonialism or war, and particular environmentalist logics. Failure to build takes on its moral valence from the way those who rule Palestinian life—Israel, international donors, and the Palestinian Authority—determine the environmental standards for Palestinian infrastructures. For these actors, the environment is a singular entity “shared” across political borders. It requires expertise Palestinians are repeatedly suspected of lacking, partly because they lack a state and experience running their own infrastructures. Failure to build thus works circularly in relation to nonsovereignty. The more nonsovereign communities “fail to build,” the more those who govern them can claim the right to control what and how they build. Third, I argue that waste infrastructures such as landfills, incinerators, and sewage treatment plants are particularly susceptible to a failure-to-build temporality because of their association with environmental harm.
Recent Palestinian Authority (PA) initiatives to help Palestine adapt to climate change help shine light on the role that climate uncertainties play in how political futures can be represented. UN-led adaptation has occasioned opportunities for new networks of actors to make claims about Palestinian futures and to perform PA readiness for statehood. These actors weigh scientific uncertainties about climate against uncertainties over if and when settler colonialism in Palestine will end. How they do so matters because it is the foundation of requests for capital that could be translated into some of the most important institutions and infrastructures of Palestinian governance over the next several years, including those that provide Palestinians with access to water. It also matters because it constitutes the image with which PA officials represent what needs to be “fixed” in Palestine in important international forums such as the UN. Climate change adaptation is a new approach to the management of uncertain environmental futures. This analysis offers insight into how this approach shapes and is shaped by practices of statecraft in places marked by the volatilities of war, economic crisis, and occupation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.