Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Reproduction of Vulnerability in Santa Fe, Argentina

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project examines the vulnerability of urban populations to hazards. As one of the most important additions to social science research on climate change in the last three decades, vulnerability studies have enriched the understanding of the factors that predispose people to climate-related risk. Yet, earlier engineering-based analyses of hazards still guide contemporary policy and practice, while the social causes are consistently overlooked. This project is a case study of Santa Fe, Argentina, a city ravaged by consecutive floods over the last decade, to analyze how social, political, and economic factors at multiple scales interact to reproduce vulnerability. Due to a legacy of hydraulic works, government officials and residents fail to question engineering-based responses (i.e. technical fixes) to floods and flood risk, allowing them to become deeply embedded in, rather than autonomous from, the local political landscape. In contrast to the development literature that often characterizes policy as a government imposition on local people, this dissertation project examines how governmental schemes work in conjunction with and through the practices and desires of local populations. By conceptualizing clientelism as both an adaptive response of the urban poor to maintain their livelihoods as well as an outcome of dynamic political-economic processes, this research will show how clientelism placates the urban poor's everyday problems, while deepening the root causes of their vulnerability. The project research questions are: 1) How has the conventional framing of hazards come to dominate and shape practice in Santa Fe?; and 2) How do local political actors and residents become complicit in sanctioning engineering fixes that emerge from this framing? In addition to surveys and mapping techniques, in-depth interviews with key informants, government officials, and local residents will provide data on how different actors influence political decisions related to floods and flood risk; who is made less vulnerable by those decisions; and how those decisions affect the urban poor's access to resources in political and social institutions. The findings from this project will help illuminate different types of human adaptive responses to climate-related change, particularly in areas persistently at risk of hazards. The investigators expect to demonstrate the complex and multiscalar interplay between the social, political and economic processes that shape how hazards affect people and the institutions that facilitate maladaptation by rendering risk technical. Over the coming decades, national governments and international development agencies will invest billions of dollars to support climate change efforts. Thus far, climate change negotiations have mostly focused on mitigation. But as the political repercussions of the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 4th Assessment Report demonstrated, the challenge of designing effective policies to protect vulnerable people remain. Responding to the call for rigorous social science research on climate change, the results of this project will serve to fill theoretical and practical gaps in the understanding of the social dimensions of vulnerability as well as adaptive responses to climate-related hazards. In addition, research results will help identify ways that governments and international development agencies can develop more robust and politically feasible policies to protect vulnerable groups. This study of maladaptation aims to help policy makers better understand the everyday processes that produce climate-related vulnerabilities in order to identify pathways towards more sustainable policy responses. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.