Description
Climate change effects are widely understood to be differentially distributed, both among states, and between social groups. This distribution is explained in the literature through the concept of ‘vulnerability’, and those who are affected are described as ‘the vulnerable’. An indexing project of ranking states according to their vulnerability to climate change has developed in response to calls for knowledge production from the UNFCCC and the IPCC. This positivist approach has had a depoliticising effect, obscuring the actions and choices that create vulnerability, and forcing the concept into a developmental framework.
This paper uses feminist research on vulnerability, particularly by Judith Butler, to critique climate change vulnerability discourse, and to argue that it is itself vulnerabilising. Feminist theory troubles the logic that invulnerability is the norm, and that vulnerability is a function of poverty or of gender. Invulnerability is instead framed as a masculine, ‘First World’ fantasy that wealth and technology can create safety, and that vulnerability is something inherent to the feminised, racialised ‘other’.
This theoretical approach then allows a rethinking of the vulnerability of so-called ‘sinking islands’, that uncovers the colonial logics of inherent vulnerability that are repeated in climate change politics. Resistance to these logics has come from islanders themselves, both in the academic work of scholars such as Epeli Hau’ofa and Teresia Teaiwa, and in the activism of groups such as 350 Pacific. Islanding climate change vulnerability therefore involves a critique of the dominant approach, and a reimagining of what it means to be vulnerable through feminist and islander resistance discourses.
