Miss Chelsea M Dunn1
1Queen's University, Canada
Biography:
Chelsea Dunn is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Canada). Supervised by Dr. Susanne Soederberg, Chelsea is spending six months in Manila, Philippines and Brisbane, Australia where she is conducting research on the inter-scalar governance of highways. Chelsea is the coordinator for the Research Network on Women, Peace and Security (RN-WPS) and is a research fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). Chelsea will be in Brisbane at the time of the conference.
Abstract:
As cities face mounting environmental hazards under climate change, climate-resilient infrastructure has become a cornerstone of global environmental governance. Recognizing that infrastructure operates as a critical mediator between ecological hazards and the core rhythms of urban life, cities are scrambling to ensure that vital forms of infrastructure are resilient—able to withstand or bounce back from the key shocks and stressors associated with climate change. Despite its growing salience in governance circles, there is a relative lack of literature which considers the material processes and outcomes of climate-resilient infrastructure projects. This paper addresses this gap by turning to an underexamined aspect of urban infrastructure: highways. Drawing on field work undertaken in Metro Manila, Philippines—which, in addition to being the largest urban centre in the world’s most disaster-prone country, is known for having the worst traffic in the world—this study seeks to deepen discussions on climate adaptation by considering the ecological, political, social and economic facets of resilience-based highway governance. By employing an inter-scalar international political economy and environment framework, I argue that peeling back the discourses of resilience-based highway governance reveals processes of capitalist accumulation which increase transnational class cleavages and dispossess the urban poor of time, access to space, money, and ecological security. Accordingly, this paper contributes to three prominent scholarly debates: (1) the concrete outcomes of global environmental governance directives, (2) the growing literature seeking to re-politicize infrastructure development, and (3) the increasingly controversial relationship between circulation and land-based power.