Infrastructuring coastal futures: Key trajectories in Southeast Asian megacities

The search for suitable adaptation pathways to accommodate for rising sea levels resulting from global climate change is an ongoing concern for many megacities in Southeast Asia and beyond. Addressing already existing challenges resulting from land subsidence and increased occurrence of inland flooding, adaptation can take varied forms and cover widely differing concerns, spaces and time spans. Based on research carried out in the cities of Singapore, Jakarta (Indonesia), and Manila (Philippines), this paper looks at some key trajectories of current adaptation planning. We argue that the processes of infrastructuring coastal futures in these cities are characterized by different aims and measures that overlap and converge in their material effects but also compete in articulating diverging new claims to the coast. In this perspective, we describe and analyze three main trends of infrastructuring coastal futures: the securitization of coastal futures by way of transforming disaster risk reduction practices and integrating new policy concerns, the greening of coastal spaces in material and operational terms, and finally, the valorization of coastal areas through reclamation, waterfront development and the creation of high-end real estate. Along these three trajectories, coastal adaptation planning becomes a key force that can influence virtually every sector of urban development and governance, and has strong implications for the futures of coastal cities in social and political terms

Umweltgerechtigkeit

Umweltgerechtigkeit kann als Kurzformel für den Anspruch stehen, dass alle Menschen und sozialen Gruppen einen gleichwertigen Zugang zu Umweltgütern haben und zugleich von Umweltschäden nicht unproportional betroffen sind. Dieser Anspruch bildet eine umfassende Herausforderung für die Forschung und für die Raumordnung

A climate of insecurity? A short review of discussions on security implications of climate change in the United Nations, the European Union and Germany

Based on documents and political processes on the part of the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and German political actors, a potential “securitization” of climate change will be analysed and debated. The results of our analysis raises major doubts, that the respective actors are performing a securitizing move with regard to climate change in the sense of the Copenhagen School, and even more so, that we are witnessing a successful securitization in that sense.16

Gender and tenure security in Gusiiland, Kenya: Improving household welfare through land rights

This paper discusses the role of securing women’s land rights in improving household welfare in Gusiiland (Kenya). Land in Gusiiland is a social asset acquired through patrilineal descent. It is a means of production and primary source of income for the majority of the population. Although the 2010 constitution accords women full land ownership rights, a complex set of customary institutions and established practices typically restricts them to usufruct land rights. Using a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) framework, this paper argues that for Gusiiland, the realization of key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular gender equality (5), poverty and hunger reduction (1 and 2) and peace and justice (16) depends on securing land rights which is crucial for supporting women’s key role in household subsistence and gender equality broadly speaking. To this end, structural discrimination of women has to be fought in the areas of education and land governance, with the aim of implementing existing rights through improved institutional mechanisms.21