An Uncertain Climate in Risky Times: How Occupation Became Like the Rain in Post-Oslo Palestine

Abstract

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.

Scratch-and-sniff Palestine: How olfaction shapes nonsovereign infrastructural spaces

“…PA projects involve what are called “stakeholder” meetings with community representatives. Stakeholder engagements are usually fleeting and structured by and for the people running the projects (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2014, 2018; see also Li, 2007). Positing pollution as odorless further meant excluding residents from these communities, as well as larger ones, from critical consultative aspects of the processes of infrastructural development.…”

Introduction: The Struggle for Self-Determination and the Palestinian Quest for Statehood

“…23 State-building implied that the PNA was performing "a kind of statehood not based on sovereignty but on management of financial resources and credible claims to management of an uncertain future. " 24 More assiduously, this state-building effort proved to be a site of governance and control. It became an effort by which the PNA shaped power relations over space and people, rather than a strategy that could effectively halt Israeli settlement construction, end the siege on Gaza, or bring liberation.…”

Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands

“…According to Nimr, the PA lacks institutional capacities and infrastructures to comply with OIE’s standards. What is invisible in both Arieh’s and Nimr’s explanations to the state of public health and animal care in Palestine are the multiple ways that the PA’s weak institutional capacity is a result of its subjugation by Israel (Khalidi and Samour, 2011; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2018). For instance, the veterinary vaccinations in the PA’s market passes through Israel.…”