Plenary Panel
Just Transitions: Critical Responses to Complex Environmental Change
w/ Gustavo Oliveira (Clark), Jenny Baka (Penn State), Ida Djenontin (Penn State), Meredith Palmer (Buffalo), Kim Thomas (Temple), Jamie Shinn (SUNY ESF)
In the last several decades, there has been growing awareness of the negative consequences of market based efforts to confront environmental crises, including new rounds of conservation initiatives premised on the commodification and financialization of material nature as a planetary-scale solution. Tied to this is an underlying concern for the uneven social and economic outcomes generated by these market-based environmental policies and instruments. The reconfiguration of non-human nature under the banner of environmental sustainability often reinforces inequities in access, use, and management of critical land-based resources; and oftentimes at the expense of already marginalized and otherwise vulnerable populations. Much of this debate has now been centered on growing calls for a just global energy transition and the possibilities for achieving genuine transformation within a context of rapid and unprecedented environmental change.
In this panel, we hope to explore the ways geographers are engaging with questions around just transition - defined here as a framework that seeks to maximize the social and economic opportunities of climate action while minimizing challenges such as job losses, dispossession, extensive land use change, and other unintended negative consequences of climate policies, as the world attempts to transition to net zero carbon emissions. How for instance can geographic and nature-society scholarship help inform policy and action around the renewable energy transition, in ways that center questions around equity and justice? How do we account for issues of scale and non-human nature? Who are our “publics,” and how can we remain accountable to them? What subfields and methodologies are we drawing from? And how can we creatively communicate our findings? We hope that this panel will provide a forum to explore a range of epistemological and methodological questions related to the challenges and opportunities for conducting critical climate and environmental change research at the intersections of science, policy and advocacy.
Keywords: climate, adaptation, mitigation, energy, just transition, infrastructure, extractivism, land use, water, labor, dispossession, territory
Keynote
The Agrochemical Complex: From the pesticide treadmill to chemical geographies
Marion Werner, Department of Geography, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Marion Werner is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY). Marion’s research is focused on the economic restructuring of export industries, the gender and racial politics of labor, and the political economy of agri-food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. Marion is the author of Global Displacements: The making of uneven development in the Caribbean (Wiley, 2016) and Co-Editor of The Doreen Massey Reader and Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (Agenda, 2018). Her current research explores the restructuring of the global pesticide industry and its implications for rural livelihoods and regulation in the global South.