Neoliberalising Adaptation to Environmental Change: Foresight or Foreclosure?

Abstract

Neoliberalising adaptation to environmental change: foresight or foreclosure? The UK's Government Office for Science has recently released an important report, produced by its internal think tank Foresight. Over seventy peer-reviewed studies have been commissioned and some 350 experts and`stakeholders' have been involved in creating Migration and Global Environmental Change (Foresight, 2011). Its lead authors have recently published a summary of the main conclusions in the leading scientific journal Nature (Black et al, 2011), and the report has already received extensive media coverage. By virtue of its scope and authorship, the report can be considered a milestone in the scientific and practitioner fields related to environment and migration.It is targeted at a wide readership, both in academia and in policy-making circles. (1) An attached`action plan' suggests that the report's findings and recommendations are already being disseminated widely within international organisations and governance networks worldwide.We take the opportunity of its publication to consider critically the messages the report communicates. Of course, one cannot predict how its findings and recommendations will`travel' and be`translated' in different policy-making contexts: policy transfer and mobility studies have taught us to be careful in considering the relations between`global' recommendations and their differentiated uptake at the national or subnational levels. However, in our view, the report's language, logic, and take-home lessons are consistent withöindeed symptomatic oföthe wider diffusion of neoliberal views in contemporary environmental governance circles. This is despite the fact that some scholars and commentators have talked of a possible`post-neoliberal' moment coincident with the global financial crisis and its aftermath. However cautiously optimistic such talk may be, we would point to neoliberalism's zombie-like survival in spite of ongoing economic and social turmoil (Fine, 2009;Peck, 2010). Neoliberal thinking has penetrated so deeply into all aspects of social life [especially here in Britain (cf Hall 2011)] ö and into much social science discourse too (often surreptitiously) ö that it would be surprising not to find neoliberal ideas animating a policy document sponsored by any UK government department.Our commentary is not a complete assessment of the report but, rather, an attempt to highlight its philosophical basis, especially the precepts of the concept`migration as adaptation'. This concept features most prominently in the report's eighth chapter (pages 173^187), but is evident elsewhere. It can plausibly be interpreted as an extension of the neoliberal mind-set prevalent in other areas of environmental policy. It might, in the long run, help precipitate yet another`neoliberal environmental fix' (Castree, 2008, pages 146^149), in this case one focused on producing`adaptable' human subjects: that is, people able to respond tactically to anthropogenic alterations of the biophysical world while becoming ever...

Opening and Closing the Future: Climate Change, Adaptation, and Scenario Planning

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Island contributions to disaster research

“…Bettini (2013) and Nicholson (2014) argue theoretically, challenging the need for apocalyptic and dystopian narratives and providing alternatives to the intense focus on trying (and often failing) to establish a direct causal link between climate change and migration. They are concerned about the depoliticisation of climate change and migration work which does not always fully acknowledge or accept issues of power, resource distribution and marginalisation (see also Felli and Castree, 2012). Meanwhile, Ballu et al (2012) and Rankey (2011) demonstrate further the lack of empirical evidence for islands sinking or disappearing due to sea-level rise.…”

Here and now: perceptions of Indian Ocean islanders on the climate change and migration nexus

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“…Exploring climate change in wider contexts with respect to population mobility, especially within other reasons for population movement, is explored less (Nicholson 2014;Taylor 2014;Upadhyay et al 2015). Even when comparatively comprehensive overviews, such as Foresight (2011), tackle some of the why questions based on extensive literature analysis and data collection, others suggest that underlying, long-term drivers of assumptions behind the analyses remain neglected (Felli and Castree 2012).…”

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