Chair:
Niklas Harring (University of Gothenburg)
Presenters:
Emily Gregory: On Uneven Ground: The Contested Politics of Environmental Risk, Rights, and Removal in Rio de Janeiro
On the margins of the world’s cities, the one billion people residing in informal urban settlements are among the most vulnerable populations to the effects of climate change. Municipal governments have historically responded to the risk of climate-related disasters with a range of policy interventions, including removing and resettling residents in areas deemed to be of high environmental risk. These resettlements are often justified by political officials as promoting sustainable climate action and keeping residents safe. However, residents have increasingly resisted these displacement-based policies, citing inequalities in which communities are targeted for resettlement and which receive infrastructural improvements. Why do residents of informal settlements facing similar levels of environmental risk receive different policy outcomes? In this paper, I develop and test a theory of political behavior surrounding land designated as “high risk” in the favela communities of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, evaluating variation in policy outcomes in response to the threat of landslides and floods. I utilize a mixed-methods approach to trace patterns in collective resettlements justified by “environmental risk” to understand risk as not merely a geotechnical designation of the landscape, but a deeply political outcome co-produced between state and non-state actors with conflicting notions of risk. By centering the legibility of risk as a key dimension of environmental governance, this research provides a novel account of how marginalized communities contest the state’s definitions of environmental risk and negotiate their right to the city in the face of growing climate threats.
Shiran Victoria Shen (Stanford University): Adaptive Political Expression: Climate Disasters, Citizen Demand, and Platform-Mediated Engagement in Authoritarian China
As climate disasters grow more frequent and severe, understanding how citizens engage politically under conditions of environmental stress is increasingly urgent—especially in the Global South and authoritarian regimes, where risks are high but political behavior remains understudied. This paper develops a theory of adaptive political expression to explain how climate shocks generate public demands for government-led preparedness in non-democratic settings. While most research on climate risk and political behavior centers on democracies, this study theorizes how expression adapts in systems lacking electoral accountability or open discourse. Integrating insights from risk perception, authoritarian governance, and digital platform politics, the framework posits that disaster severity and type—particularly sudden-onset events—intensify risk salience and prompt more specific, policy-oriented appeals. Simultaneously, platform design shapes how these demands are articulated: state-managed platforms promote technocratic, pragmatic engagement, while semi-public platforms allow more emotive or anticipatory expression. Empirically, the study analyzes a novel dataset of tens of thousands of citizen petitions and social media posts in China, linked to georeferenced climate disasters between 2021 and 2023. Using supervised machine learning, topic modeling, and difference-in-differences estimation, it examines how shocks affect the volume, content, and platform-specific framing of citizen expression. The study contributes to comparative theories of climate adaptation, risk salience, and political behavior under authoritarian constraint.
