read All That Is Solid Melts into the Bay: Anticipatory Ruination and Climate Change Adaptation for my adaptation and development class and it made me furious. please excuse the long post this is for those interested in climate politics.
it talks about anticipatory ruination as a concept which essentially means when dominant global actors (eg. world bank, governments, powerful NGOs) frame the problem of climate change in the Global South as ONLY solvable through Western and colonial notions of quote-unquote development.
ie. "if you don't accept our plans to come into your country and tell you how to PROPERLY develop your land, your country will soon be in ruins because of climate change!" which is essentially greenwashed colonialism, and I sometimes feel silly pointing this out to people but unfortunately this is still the dominant discourse in international development and even with well-meaning actors.
images of climate change-associated ruination can include failed crops, melting icebergs, as an example. all of these nature-based images depoliticise the image and remove the agents responsible (eg. capitalists, profiting corporations)
in the case of Bangladesh, these organisations have pushed for shrimp aquaculture as a means of QUOTE-UNQUOTE adaptation to climate change, which has dispossessed rice farmers, reduced rural labour opportunities and poisoned agricultural land with saltwater, among other ecological problems its caused:
"Anticipatory ruination in Bangladesh works not only through the claims to possible futures through shrimp production, but also through the destruction of imaginations of alternative futures, such as the persistence of agriculture and the communities in Khulna that depend on it. The sense of inevitable crisis thus dialectically anticipates and produces ruination." [x]
you can read the full article, but I thought to leave this bit. the author recounts how one World Bank workshop makes participants play board games to justify their politics under the guise of teaching people QUOTE-UNQUOTE robust options for climate change adaptation, and I just...
Participants in the workshop, a variety of NGO development practitioners, researchers, and government civil servants primarily from Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, gathered around tables in a large conference room at Rotterdam's World Trade Center. We were given game boards and handfuls of beans and red pebbles as the World Bank economist explained the rules. We were told that our role in the game, representing provincial governors and national policy makers, was âto create a prosperous province and nationâ, which is sought in the game through decisions between investments in development or flood and drought protections. As we began, the economist encouraged eager game players, irreverently quipping, âlet's reward the winners, but also shame the losers!â Faulty decisions produce natural disasters, or âcrisesâ, determined by a random roll of a die, dubbed the âprobability density functionâ. In each round, ersatz provincial governors for whom the âprobability density functionâ produced a âcrisisâ were made to stand up from their seats and announce animatedly to the room: âOh No!â In an online video about the use of Decisions for the Decade and associated games developed by the same group, one player describes the moment of crisis in game play: âall of a sudden a flood hit. And I died. So⌠Well, I was washed away to a local slum town and have been subsisting off of leftover banana peels and whatnot.â As this glib takeaway highlights, the point of these games is to allow players to imagine the kind of profound ruination from which there is no return. In the context of the game, this anticipation is pervasiveâunless the player chooses the ârobust optionâ, the threat of ruination is always present.
