Climate Maladaptation: International Organizations, Carbon Cowboys, and the Politics of Climate Change in Timor-Leste
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2022
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This thesis studies the role a coalition of international organizations and green investors plays in shaping the politics of climate change in Timor-Leste. It examines the extent that adaptation and mitigation projects are achieved in reducing climate-induced vulnerabilities and greenhouse emissions. Looking at discourses embedded in specific international climate projects, climate agreements, and government policy responses can critically inform how certain climate policies are designed, particularly in the context of a post-conflict nation. By critically investigating the international efforts in climate adaptation and mitigation in Timor-Leste, this thesis inquires whether technocratic and market-based solutions to climate, governed by narratives of developmentalism, can be a solution to climate crises in the country.While climate projects are positively accepted and legitimized, climate adaptation and mitigation efforts orchestrated by global actors are, arguably, deployed as pretexts to continue the reproduction of systems of domination that have the power to reorganize the authority and interfere with the local customary practices in Timor-Leste. This is seen through how international organizations depoliticize climate adaptation as a technocratic exercise, ignoring the precarities produced by climate, underpinned by shifting economic conditions and changing labor market in a highly agrarian society as Timor-Leste. On the other hand, climate mitigation efforts give rise to carbon markets, sometimes dubbed “Carbon Cowboys,” that increasingly engage in the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends, raising potential issues of land grabbing and dispossession in a country already plagued by land tenure insecurities. This thesis proposes that a climate solution centers on decentralized authority and non-domination is possible, a practice already grounded in the Indigenous Timorese traditions of conservation.
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Environmental studies, Asian studies
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92 pages
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