Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemPlanned resettlement to avoid climatic hazards: What prospects for just outcomes in China?(WILEY, 2019-07-22)Planned resettlement is being widely considered as a response to the impacts of climate change. As many millions of people are expected to be displaced in the coming decades, scholars and policymakers are searching for precedence to inform their research and planning, particularly from experiences of Development- Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR). Nowhere in the world is DIDR and other closely related forms of planned resettlement more prevalent than in China: an estimated 78 million people have been displaced by development projects over the last six decades. While planned resettlement has consistently been shown to cause impoverishment, the Chinese state views it as the answer to a multitude of social ills including poverty, environmental damage, low levels of domestic consumption, and most recently, climate change, providing impetus to the normalisation of resettlement as adaptation. This paper examines the prospects for just outcomes in resettlement projects by examining distributive justice at multiple scales in existing resettlement practice in China. It finds that due to the interplay between resettlement and questions of procedural justice, prospects for just outcomes are quite limited, and that in order to achieve fair adaptation, alternatives to planned resettlement should be emphasised.
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ItemEstimating urban water demand under conditions of rapid growth: the case of Shanghai(SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2017-04)
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ItemAdaptation science and policy in China's agricultural sector(WILEY, 2016-09-01)In recent years, China's central government has begun to articulate its adaptation policy and to identify measures to adapt the nation's agriculture to changing precipitation patterns, higher temperatures, and extreme events. These developments are occurring at a time when the agricultural sector is in flux: while the major grain crops—rice, wheat, and corn—are still central to food security, many smallholder farmers have shifted away from land‐intensive production to growing higher‐value, labour‐intensive horticultural products, such as fruit and vegetables. In addition, new forms of agriculture are emerging because of out‐migration and land transfers. This review introduces the adaptation policy context for agricultural adaptation in China and reviews existing research on impacts and adaptation. It then discusses how well existing research and policy actually reflect the challenges of adapting China's farms to climate change. Four issues are discussed which together suggest that current science and policy very poorly reflect challenges on the ground: the framing of agriculture as a relatively homogeneous sector; the absence of any vulnerability assessments attuned to local contexts; a bias toward large‐scale engineering solutions; and insufficient consideration of local government capacity. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:693–706. doi: 10.1002/wcc.414 This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies
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ItemGovernmentality and the conduct of water: China's South-North Water Transfer Project(WILEY, 2016-10)Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.
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ItemThe politics of water: a review of hydropolitical frameworks and their application in China(Wiley, 2017)Academic literature on the politics of water encompasses hydrosocial relations at different scales, the role of technology in hydropolitics, and the various rationalities and discourses behind the governance of water. In this advanced review, we outline the key hydropolitical frameworks, tracing the development of scholarship that examines the relations between power, water, society, and technology. We then synthesize the literature on hydropolitics in China, which boasts both the world's largest dam (by installed capacity) and the world's largest interbasin transfer project. We consider the extent to which different frameworks have been productively applied in a Chinese context, not just to understand big infrastructure, but to question of water pollution, agricultural water use, and water scarcity. In doing so, we find that critical scholarship on hydropolitics in China has a number of significant gaps. These gaps constrain our understanding of the inherent political nature of the many acute water challenges China currently faces and challenges that have impacts well beyond its borders.
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ItemEveryday practices and technologies of household water consumption: evidence from Shanghai(International Institute for Environment and Development, 2019-04-01)A social practice approach to household consumption examines socially produced patterns of practice, and understands these to be composed of technology, knowledge and meaning. This approach challenges many of the assumptions made about how consumers who are supposedly economically rational behave in large-scale municipal water supply systems. Yet for an emerging body of scholarship that is sensitive to the effects of context, research on social practices is notably short of studies beyond wealthy liberal democracies. In this paper we examine the key practices of daily water consumption for households in Shanghai, China. We identify boiling water, filtering water, and buying water as the three key practices associated with daily water consumption in the home, and explain the way each is the result of combinations of knowledge, meaning and technology. We also consider short-term and longer-term shifts in practices, and explain the influence of the materiality of pollution, information and trust on these changing practices.