Audio transcript
University of Illinois Department of Geography
Phone Interview by Joe Cone, Sept. 22, 2008
[Music and sfx up]
Joe Cone: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists and other leaders on this issue. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, such as meteorologists, journalists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today’s conversation is with Jesse Ribot of the University of Illinois’s School of Earth Society and Environment. At the time of this conversation, Dr. Ribot was a senior associate in the Institutions & Governance Program at World Resources (Institute).
Welcome, Jesse, thanks for being with us. Let’s start with how you became involved in climate change issues.
[Time: 1:04]
Jesse Ribot: In short, I was asked in 1991 to help a group in Brazil to synthesize material for a large preparatory conference for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, which was to take place in Rio in ’92. And the conference was on climate and sustainable development in the semiarid tropics. Now I had worked before that mostly on rural development, and particularly on wellbeing and marginality of forest dependent populations in West Africa. So, I knew a little bit about semiarid lands.
And I went to this meeting and I read about seventy articles that had been submitted for the conference, this preparatory meeting for UNCED. And the material was fantastic, but it was extremely short on social science analysis of why it is that people were exposed to the kinds of variability that are fairly ordinary in the climates of most semiarid lands. And that was how I got interested in the top of social vulnerability to hunger, famine, dislocation, economic loss, in the face of climate variability and change.
Joe Cone: I know that in 1996, you were one of the editors and authors in a book published by Cambridge called Climate Variability, Climate Change and Social Vulnerability in The Semiarid Tropics. Maybe before we start talking about some of the specifics about vulnerability, those of us in northern latitudes hear about semiarid tropics and we may think they aren’t the norm and wonder why you focused on them.
[Time: 3:02]
Jesse Ribot: Well, first off, I did my doctoral work in West Africa in Senegal, which is a semiarid zone, in the tropics. And there is a belt of semiarid regions around the earth, including a very large desert area in Brazil. Most people think of rainforests when they go to Brazil. Semiarid Northeast Brazil is semi-desertic. A very dry area. And, you go all the way around the globe to parts of Australia, Western China. There are…This is an area in which I think something on the order of twenty-five percent of the world’s population lives. So it’s not trivial. And they tend…By the way, they tend, the people who live in the semiarid areas tend to be the most vulnerable to hunger, famine and dislocation. They are the poorest of the poor.
Joe Cone: In that 1996 book, you took a different approach to analyzing social vulnerability to climate variability and change?
Jesse Ribot: I think that if you look at a climate event and you…and you see a disaster that unfolds around it, you can all…It’s very easy to say, oh, that was the impact of that particular hurricane. Or, the impact of that particular drought was this particular set of…people drowning, or another group losing their farms. But if you look at the fact that the same magnitude event in different places has completely different outcomes – a drought in Northeast Brazil kills a million people; whereas in Southwest United States it doesn’t kill anybody. It’s mostly economic loss – you begin to realize that the outcome is not a consequence of drought. It’s a consequence of a set of underlying social, political, economic conditions.
Joe Cone: And therefore, you give your research attention to a different focus.
[Time: 5:04]
Jesse Ribot: Well, the focus is on, how do we understand the causal structure of vulnerability? Why are people in Northeast Brazil vulnerable? Now, of course, we know they’re poor; they have very few household assets. But you can’t stop by saying, oh, they’re poor, because poverty is not just some phenomenon of people who are left behind from the fast pace of development and change; they’re people who are pushed into the margins. They’re people who are systematically made poor by social policy, by economic policy. They are people who are very productive. They’re small farmers. And yet, they cannot keep the product of their labor.
So when I think of causality and I think of why people are vulnerable to hunger and famine in the face of climate variability, or change, I think of questions like, why do governments produce policies that enable large urban merchants to extract most of the profit from agriculture? Things of that sort help us understand why these people are, in fact, exposed and vulnerable.
Joe Cone: Your point is that vulnerability results from policy choices?
Jesse Ribot: Well, there are many different layers of policy choice. There are policy choices on the New Jersey shore to rebuild the beaches every year so that millionaires can have large houses on the beach. And when a hurricane comes, they’re gonna get blown away, but they’re gonna have insurance. So, they’re barely vulnerable. There are also policy decisions to channel resources toward the most productive areas, which means that areas that are less productive and marginal don’t have the sufficient infrastructure.
Northeast Brazil itself was always poor, because the government of Brazil had a policy of investing in agriculture in the south, and not in Northeast Brazil. And so Northeast Brazil was on the margins. And in each one of the drought periods, people would migrate out, and they would end up on the edges of the cities in slums, where they would end up on the frontier of the Amazon. So much of the problems on the Amazon frontier came from the failure of the government of Brazil to deal with investments in the semiarid northeast, where there were large numbers of people on marginally productive land, which could have been a lot more productive if the government’s policy was not to maximize profit across the nation, but to minimize risk and to optimize wellbeing.
The flooding of the Mississippi River, the hundred year flood that happened a decade ago, that kind of a flood was made much worse by a policy that allowed communities to build floodwalls, and to build onto floodplains, and to channel water and to…many different things that went on that made it so that when the big flood came it would be even bigger, because the runoff wouldn’t diffuse as easily. And also, many more people were in areas that were known to be floodplains.
In the U.S. it’s much easier. We can say things…You could make a policy like it is illegal to build on barrier islands on the Atlantic Coast. If you want insurance, you’re not gonna get it if you build there.
Then, you’d end up with a very dynamic to have. I think there are good reasons to allow people to live in beautiful places. But to do it in ways where there are construction standards that are so high that they can withstand the storm, that there are evacuation plans that are good enough to get people out of there and where the cost of that is borne by those who choose to live there. Now, this is not always obvious, because the poor often end up in the most vulnerable areas because they can’t afford to live in the more secure areas. That would be the case where poor people move further and further out into deltas and low lying areas, or further and further into dry lands. They’ll move in, perhaps, in a period that’s not so dry, because they simply have no other options.
And, again, while in a very well regulated county you could probably make it illegal to do that, or create disincentives that are sufficient, it’s very hard in the developing world.
Joe Cone: The world’s poor will likely suffer a double whammy from expected climate change in this century. One, because it’s already, I believe, generally perceived that it’s the poorer areas of the world that will be just affected by climate change. But now you’re also saying that they’re more vulnerable to begin with.
[Time: 10:29]
Jesse Ribot: They’re vulnerable to different kinds of outcomes. The rich tend to be vulnerable to economic loss. The poor, since they don’t have anything to loose, in terms of economic loss, are much more vulnerable to the loss of livelihoods, to dislocation, as in having to migrate. To hunger, famine and death. So, those are different kinds of exposure, different kinds of vulnerability.
Joe Cone: You know, much of the attention, in the developed world at least, appears to be about personal consumer choices – what car they drive, what light bulbs they use, that sort of thing. I’d like to hear your thoughts about this.
Jesse Ribot: On the question of consumerism, there are two ends to this climate equation. One is the question of mitigation. Who’s really responsible for this? And who should do it? And, there’s one law of sort of discourse around the voluntary simplicity discourse saying, oh, we need to consume less. We need to make consumers see the cost and internalize externalities so that they’ll consume less.
And, I think that there’s also a set of solutions that have to do with regulating consumption. We have rules on how much insulation you put into a house. There are CAFE standards, which keep getting…Those are the car efficiency standards. Automobile efficiency standards. There’s an ideology that everyone should do what they want to do, and I disagree. I actually think that simplicity and downsizing our consumption has got to be regulated. And, I’m not going to go to extremes to be a conservationist, because I don’t think my contribution matters all that much. Unless, there’s a broader scale of legislation saying we have to quadruple the insulation in our houses. We have to drive much more efficient cars.
The market is an instrument, but it is not a sufficient instrument for many of these sorts of things. I work on questions in the last decade of representation. That is, how are rural people, in particular natural resource dependent populations, forest based populations. I work mostly in Africa, but Latin America and Asia as well. How are they represented in decisions concerning these resources on which they depend?
And, what you find is that in the rural world in Africa there are a number of different kinds of organizations and institutions. There is local government, often. Either appointed local administrators from the central government, or – and often in parallel to this – elected local authorities. They’re customary chiefs, there are NGO’s, there are projects from international donors. There are all kinds of characters out there intervening on behalf of local populations to help them manage, live within and live on the resources around them. Those institutions have gone under a great attack as well during the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Government was seen as a very good thing. It was the beacon of development and change. It was the…government was the forefront of progress. Government would support things. And civil society was seen as backward, primordial and corrupt. It was seen as the object of development.
In the eighties, you get this funny flip. Suddenly civil society is the beacon of development and change, and government is backward primordial and corrupt. That flip was ideological.
In reality, civil society, NGO’s, they have their functions, but government does too. However, during the eighties and nineties…eighties, really mostly, you had a big attack on government and a proliferation of NGO’s. It starts with the Reagan-Thatch revolution with privatization. And in Africa, as you privatized…and this was at the same period they were attacking the marketing boards and trying to get rid of them. As you privatized, people were finding out that the services that local people needed weren’t getting to them any more. That roads weren’t getting built as well. That water services, health, education were declining. And, that privatization was not gonna be the solution to everything.
And yet, because they were so anti-government they couldn’t imagine working with local government, or government itself. It was all predicated on the idea that big government, the state had to be taken apart. And so, we get the third sector movement which is NGO’s. And so donors and everybody begins funding NGO’s to provide services, creating a kind of a middleclass service sector out there that provides services on behalf of central government and large donors and large NGO’s. There’s all these small NGO’s out there.
The third sector civil society approaches did O.K., but they didn’t serve people all that well. Highly skewed. They tended not to serve the poor, serve the poor very well. They tended to be self-interested and not responsive to the people who they were ostensibly serving, but rather to those who were giving them money in order to serve them. So, again, it was a reproduction of the old system, except through quasi private, what I call nonmarket privatization.
But, as of late, in the last decade, we’ve had a move in which government is coming back in. And elected governments are being established, and there’s talk of democracy. And there’s talk of local democracy. I work on the question of how and when does local democracy work to provide services to people who are dependent on the natural resources that we all depend on to some degree. And what I see is that those broader levels of discourse and ideology have undermined the emergence of democratic local government, pretty much around the world. It’s been a very slow process. But linking that back to the question of climate and vulnerability, people who have influence over the authorities that govern them are more likely to have authorities that respond to their needs.
Now, I have a lot to say about adaptation and the adaptation side. But, I’m using the term because it’s being used more generally. However, adaptation itself, as a term, tends to blame the victim. It tends to view people who are living in marginal areas or living in exposed areas, in one way or another it tends say you, like a biological organism, have to adapt to whatever stimuli come along.
It steers attention away from the other questions of, hey, why are they vulnerable? Why are they exposed? Which comes back to the very beginning of our conversation, which is the real issue is the causal structure of vulnerability. Of households, of communities, that live in areas where drought may occur, where sea level rise may have an affect and where storms and other climate events may be frequent or periodic, but are a risk.
Joe Cone: Can you talk more about the causes of vulnerability?
[Time: 19:11]
Jesse Ribot: Let me talk about two forms of causality. One is the…Well, two domains of causality really. One is causality of climate change. That is not what I’m referring to. The other is causality of vulnerability.
Which is to say, if you have a house, or a household that’s sitting on a bluff that may be exposed to particular higher sea level…may be exposed to storms, more exposed, then you have a number of questions you have to ask. Which are, okay, given that there is now knowledge that that is a risk, what can be done? Are there simple solutions? Are there solutions that require government intervention? And if they’re not being done, why aren’t they being done? If they are being done, why are they being done? Those are the things that will explain to us why, when an event comes along, that household was or was not damaged.
..Okay? And that causality is much more important than…Now, the question of causality of climate change is important in one way because it helps us attribute some responsibility on the who should pay for those interventions question. However, it’s not all about the climate itself changing And it’s…The case you brought up of the Maine coast is interesting, because nobody had any expectation that there would be any change like this. They built houses fully expecting that they would be in a secure place. Suddenly the world changes around them. That is a situation where it’s very hard to call the causality social.
The only thing in terms of causality that you can call social here is the response to the knowledge that there is a change coming and that there are new risks ahead. However, when you talk about semiarid lands, where I do most of my work, you talk about hunger, famine and dislocation, these are areas where climate variability has been a problem forever. And yet, nobody has done anything about it. It’s as if the hardships that people are exposed to every day don’t matter, unless we talk about some far future moment when the climate might change. When, in fact, these people are vulnerable today.
And so there you begin to say, well, wow! This has been known for a long time. And, why are these people so…There’s a class of people, usually. You begin to see that vulnerability is itself stratified. There are wealthy people. There are poor people. There are people in different professions. There are gender differences in exposure….
Joe Cone: Certainly.
Jesse Ribot: …and vulnerability. And, those differences, when you begin to map them out, you have to ask yourself, well, how come populations in particular areas are so profoundly poor? And, that may sound like a funny questions to ask, but when you begin analyzing household income of farmers in semiarid lands, you see that they make a significant amount of…Well, they produce a significant amount of grain, of meat and they sell it on markets which are so unfavorable to them. They’re in a situation where collective bargaining is very difficult, due to the fact that they live in very diffuse populations and where government has not stepped in with things like marketing boards. Has not protected their prices. And where they are exposed to rents on their labor, rents in kind, rents in cash. They’re exposed to poor exchange rates. They are really…No matter how much they make, their retained income is pushed down to a subsistence level. And there are very few policies that push to correct that situation, at a structural level.
I mean, this is big. This is big level of institution and causality in that in the developing world, many people make an income that is insufficient to purchase the products they produce. It’s called a disarticulated economy. An enclave export economy, for example. They produce bananas. They get a subsistence wage. The bananas are exported. They buy beans and they live on beans and rice. And, it’s not like a developing country…a developed country, industrialized country economy where the wages of the people who work in the economy are what create the demand for the products of the economy.
The developing world ends up with economies where urban leads buy the products, or they’re exported, and most people buy only subsistence goods. And, to change that is extremely difficult. But, it’s something that requires looking into every level of agricultural and economic policy. And those things are not even considered part of the vulnerability question, when people begin to look at it.
Joe Cone: I’m curious about this new initiative on social dimensions of environmental policy that you’re taking on at the University of Illinois. Tell me a bit about your goals and perhaps what will be different about this initiative, as you see it from other programs relating to environment and society.
[Time: 25:55]
Jesse Ribot: Hmm. There are a couple of things. One is that most of the problems that we face, there are technical solutions. Yeah, you can make ethanol out of corn. You can make much more efficient homes and buildings. And, in fact, oftentimes like in make more efficient homes and buildings, it’s cheaper than not making them more efficient. The question is not whether we have the technical solutions. And that’s been the kind of traditional approach to environment problems. You get the researchers who are…on the technical side they propose solutions and then they run the other direction to find new solutions to more problems.
Why is it that…Well, when do those solutions get taken up as policy? That’s one set of questions we’d like to focus on. Under what conditions do fixes, or whether they’re to an economic circumstance or to a technical set of problems, get codified into law?
Joe Cone: Um hmm. Um hmm.
Jesse Ribot: But more importantly, there are a lot of laws that are very good that don’t get implemented in practice. And looking at the implementation side as well. So that’s one strand in which there is a lot of work to be done by social scientist in understanding everything from the political uptake to the broader social acceptance and demand for particular kinds of policy solutions, to the ways in which every policy change is a kind of redistribution.
But my personal interest is to begin looking more at the question of adaptation. And the reason is that adaptation is being viewed by many people as a kind of way to support local people to cope with problems that they are facing with climate change. Now, one of the big problems in this is that the donors would like that assistance to only help them in matters of climate change. They don’t care about climate variability and they don’t care about problems that are not directly about the climate issue.
And I think that if we begin to look at vulnerability in the face of climate change and climate variability, we begin to see that, again, it comes back to these broad economic and social policy questions. I would like to work on looking at the causes of vulnerability, so that we can begin to bring to the attention the fact that a famine is not the singular outcome of a climate impact, but it is the outcome of a number of causal factors.
So, the climate comes and hits these people over the head, but the people didn’t have any assets. The people didn’t have a social security system. The people had poor roads. The people had poor education. Poor communication systems. To look at those aspects and to begin asking, well, where can we invest to reduce their vulnerability that might, in fact, not be anywhere near the impact of the climate event. That is to say, it may not be investing in shielding people from this event. But, in fact, in building up their asset base and other things that are much more traditional development policy, writ large. Something that the climate side of the donor community does not want to get into.
Joe Cone: This has been a conversation with Dr. Jesse Ribot, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. I’m Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That’s “s-e-a-grant”: one word, “dot,” “oregonstate” as one word, “dot, edu.” Thank you for listening.
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