Reimagining Climate Resilient Development: Radical Hope and Climate Action in the Philippines
Speakers
The Philippines is consistently ranked among the countries most vulnerable to climate hazards in the world. Decades of climate interventions have relied primarily on top-down and infrastructural solutions which are often undermined by elite capture and corruption, while sidelining the forms of knowledge and strategies which communities already hold. In this seminar we flip the switch and ask: what lessons about hope and resilience can we learn from the grassroots – from the communities who face climate hazards directly?
This seminar will open a space for discussion of how the knowledge, values, and capacities of people in and from the Global South can offer policy solutions that are grounded in lived realities. It consists of two short presentations: (1) how grassroots movements generate and sustain “radical hope”: a deliberate political stance that mobilizes collective agency when state institutions fail to respond, and (2) community-based indicators of climate resilient development, co-designed with local residents as a counterpart and counterweight to universal and top-down blueprints.
Drawing insights from the British Academy-funded project Ahon: Stories and imaginaries of resilience and progress in a changing climate, case studies from the Philippines will showcase how an understanding of people’s aspirations of ‘a good life’ can inform climate-resilient development pathways that currently tend to be dominated by Eurocentric ideas and to favour technocratic solutions.
Speaker & chair biographies
Dr. Justin See is a lecturer in Development Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His research interrogates how dominant modes of climate change adaptation (e.g. planned resettlement, climate buffer infrastructure, nature-based solutions) generate injustices while advancing community-led pathways to sustainable development. He is a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report (AR7), Working Group II, Chapter 8 (Asia), an associate deputy editor for Climatic Change, and an adjunct research fellow at the La Trobe Centre for Global Security.
Dr. Angela Minas is a Research Fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. Her work sits at the intersection of climate change and global development – exploring issues and collaborative solutions around access to energy, agricultural livelihoods, resilience, and low-carbon transformations – with a focus on communities and groups that are often underrepresented. As an invited expert and partner, her research has helped inform policy and practice on climate action, renewable energy, and social sustainability for the UK Government, EU Parliament, and UNESCAP. She currently leads Ahon, a British Academy-funded project which explores climate resilient development in the Philippines.
Dr. Sharmila Parmanand is Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation and Associate at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.
*Banner photo by Geio Tischler on Unsplash
LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.