GLD Virtual Annual Conference - Panel 2b: Climate Change

Chair: 

Dongshu Liu (City University of Hong Kong)

Presenters:

Jingping LIU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University): From Contention to Clientelism: Evidence from the Fishing Ban in Rural China

How do Chinese rural populations resist the authoritarian state’s unpopular policies? Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the implementation of the Ten-Year Fishing Ban in a county in the Yangtze River Basin, I found that fishermen continued to fish by maintaining a clientelist linkage with street-level bureaucrats. In the fishing ban, the unified compensation policy and the state’s direct monitoring of the fishermen limited the effectiveness of appealing to the upper-level governments and village leaders, respectively. The fishermen hence directly sought protection of the street-level bureaucrats in two ways: bribery and moral appeal. While the effectiveness of bribery to secure protection was enhanced by local social networks to a limited extent, that of moral appeal was facilitated by the tolerance of upper-level governments with the concern for regime legitimacy. This protection was essentially clientelist for entrenching the power of street-level bureaucrats with the potential to arouse larger-scale popular grievances to threaten regime stability.

Noura Wahby (University of Cambridge): How to Be Both: Water Shortage and Abundance as Crises

Extreme weather changes in the Middle East and North Africa have exacerbated the chronic lack and damaging abundance of water. With regional temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, states have engaged in megaprojects designed to improve water security in the region and invested in new water technologies. Yet, while state-led development struggles to catch up with the lack and abundance of water, urban communities have developed their own methods of sustainable access to water, especially in times of crisis like the COVID 19 Pandemic. Communities lie at the crux of water supply, maintenance, and quality and water governance operates as part of self-built networks in urban milieus; and is constructed through grassroots efforts, and heterogeneous configurations of socio-technical relations. Negotiations between state, non-state actors and within communities determine how livelihoods are affected by water in/security such as food security, sanitation, and citizenship. My study explores how communities come together and compete to create networks of sustainable and localized efforts to guarantee access, supply, repair and maintenance of public commons such as water. This research builds on doctoral study on the role of the state in urban water security in Cairo (Egypt) to map infrastructural community efforts in informal and elite neighbourhoods. Since the pandemic and under International Monetary Fund conditionalities, the Egyptian state is steadily removing subsidies for water and energy prices, leading communities to depend on self-help networks to provide their basic needs. I employ qualitative research methods to study grassroots resilience practices to analyse future pathways for development.