Northwestern Events Calendar

Apr
27
2015

Whither Causality: Vicissitudes of Climate-Crisis Explanation

When: Monday, April 27, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, Conference Room, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: Free

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Abstract: Adaptation is forward looking. But we need to look back at the causes of fragility to move toward security. Causal analysis of vulnerability aims to identify the roots of crises so that transformative solutions might be found. Yet root-cause analysis is absent from most climate response assessments. Framings for climate-change risk analysis often locate causality in hazards while attributing some causal weight to proximate social variables such as poverty or lack of capacity. They rarely ask why capacity is lacking, assets are inadequate or social protections are absent or fail. This talk frames vulnerability and security as matters of access to assets and social protections. Assets and social protections each have their own context-contingent causal chains. A key recursive element in those causal chains is the ability – means and powers – of vulnerable people to influence the political economy that shapes their assets and social protections. Vulnerability is, as Sen rightly observed, linked to the lack of freedom – the freedom to influence the political economy that shapes entitlements. With climate change human causes of climate hazard must also now be accounted for in etiologies of disaster. However, attention to anthropogenic climate change should not occlude social causes of (and responsibility for) vulnerability – vulnerability is still produced in and by society. Unlike plants and animals that adapt to immediate stimuli, humans have memory and history to inform our adjustments to socio-structural and biophysical challenge. The same history attributes responsibility and liability, making that history contentious and erasable. I will refract these issues the case of vulnerable forest villagers in Eastern Senegal. 

Bio: Jesse Ribot is Professor of Geography, Anthropology and Naturel Resources and Environmental Studies at University of Illinois since 2008. Before 2008, he worked at the World Resources Institute, taught at MIT and was a fellow at The New School, Yale, Rutgers, Max Planck Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center and Harvard. He is an Africanist studying local democracy, resource access and social vulnerability.

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