Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

Abstract

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank's Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.

Global environmental change II: Political economies of vulnerability to climate change

“…This is done not merely as a way to avoid the threat that recognition of their role in social vulnerability poses to their legitimacy, but more actively as a way to reproduce themselves (Warner et al, 2018). There is, for example, an emerging body of work critiquing the way the development industry has appropriated climate change vulnerability and adaptation as a means to sustain their relevance in a world where ‘development’ itself is a far less intellectually and practically plausible project (Mikulewicz and Taylor, 2019).…”

“…The network of development banks has firmly established themselves as the providers of the architecture for funding climate change adaptation in middle and lower income countries. This includes providing the templates for financial instruments such as the Global Environmental Facility and the Green Climate Fund, the network of institutions that implement climate change 'projects' in countries, and the circulation of ideas about adaptation through networks and projects (Weisser et al, 2014;Webber, 2015Webber, , 2016De Roeck, 2019;Mikulewicz and Taylor, 2019). Thus, the architecture of adaptation reflects that of development funding, complete with its institutionalisation of adaptation as a system of vertical flows of money, ideas, and people that displaces the generation of transformative ideas and practices that might come from more horizontal exchanges among 'vulnerable' countries (Webber, 2016;De Roeck, 2019;Goh, 2019).…”

Building Slavery-free Communities: A Resilience Framework

“…The concept of resilience has been applied across international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme and European Union (Mikulewicz & Taylor, 2019). However, the vast array of multi-disciplinary interpretations has also prompted criticism of the concept.…”

Hydro-climatic and Land use/cover Changes in Nasia Catchment of the White Volta Basin in Ghana

“…Climate change is unequivocal, manifested by rapid warming of the globe and increasing the frequency of extreme events, such as floods and droughts (IPCC, 2014). Africa, for example, is expected to experience negative climate change impacts, contributing to already present problems of widespread poverty and low development (World Bank, 2010;Mikulewicz and Taylor, 2020). At the background of climate change is the variability of the hydro-climatic parameters, such as temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, discharge, potential evapotranspiration, radiation etc., both in their long-term average and by an increase over time.…”