Resisting climate change vulnerability: feminist and decolonial insights

Abstract

In climate politics, understanding and contesting the meaning of vulnerability has proved extremely difficult. On the one hand, it is an increasingly formalised term that means something very specific scientifically and methodologically within the climate change institutions. On the other hand, vulnerability is part of a colonial discursive framework of risk. In this article, I show how contestations into the scientific project have not sufficiently worked to address the colonial geographic imaginaries that underlie the discursive framework of vulnerability. I suggest that bringing together the work of critical adaptation studies (CAS) with critical feminist and decolonial scholarship, such as the counternarratives of the Pacific,offers a way to resist the victimising politics of disposability and also rethink vulnerability as a concept of resistance, relationality and reflexivity.