Repair and responsibility in ruined environments of the global South

Application summary

A key question in confronting climate change and environmental vulnerability is how to repair environments and livelihoods damaged by resource extractivism. This project will develop a multi-sited, multi-temporal, and multi-scale approach to analyse initiatives for repair and claims for responsibility in areas of the global South that have been affected by massive extraction and are highly vulnerable in the face of climate change. We analyse the impacts of oil, mineral, timber, and water extractions in Mexico, Indonesia, and Cambodia, and the ways in which people living at the extractive frontlines reimagine and recraft the repairing of their environments and livelihoods, together with relevant state, private-sector, and civil-society actors. We argue that radically new approaches are needed to examine strategies of ecological restoration in connection with approaches that address the sociopolitical dynamics involved, including social dispossession, uneven power relations, and traumas of loss. REPAIR will develop novel approaches to analyse: 1) initiatives for repair; 2) the search for responsibility; and 3) efforts at repossession towards more livable futures. The methods include interviews with state officials, private sector, NGOs, and local residents, combined with participant observation, social cartographies, and documentary analyses of restoration plans, environmental assessments, policy reports, and media sources. The novelty of the approach rests in examining the multi-sitedness in the efforts of repair; in analysing multi-temporal aspects of responsibility by examining who should be held accountable for harms and take responsibility for repair, and in considering multi-scalar initiatives for repossession and restitution. The research will provide insights into opportunities and constraints involved in multi-scalar initiatives for repair, responsibility, and repossession, and their overlapping effects.