This study examines how the idea of having to adapt to a changing climate influences recent Rwandan environmental politics and the relations with international organizations and NGOs. By conceptualizing adaptation as matter of translation, processes of resignification and network building are highlighted, taking broader social developments, historical trajectories and the makeup of Rwandan international relations into consideration. Based on analyses of a variety of primary and secondary data, the main findings add to a more detailed understanding of rationalizing, planning, and implementing climate change adaptation. (Series: Forum Political Geography / Forum Politische Geographie, Vol. 14) [Subject: African Studies, Climate Studies, Environmental Studies, Politics]

This book explores the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd - two major but peripheral cities little discussed outside of Russia. It unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis, from global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and varieties of adoption or refusal of those narratives among host city residents. In so doing, the book offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events regardless of national context.

The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders. Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.

As climate change is becoming more severe, drought is threatening to disrupt agrarian societies. This book investigates the connections between drought and social conflict over land and water. It is a comparative study of eight dryland regions in Sub-saharan Africa, South and East Asia and South America. Sören Köpke looks at different agricultural production systems and analyses environmental conflicts linked to drought. Through the political ecology approach, the author highlights the power imbalances underpinning these conflicts. A central finding: Development strategies decide if a conflict escalates or not. The book contributes to the on-going debate on the link between climate change and conflict.

This book develops the concept of affective nationalism - the banal affirmation of the national emerging in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects. Based on eight months of ethnographic field work, conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Azerbaijan, the book examines the ways in which moments of bodily encounter perpetuate banal enactments and experiences of national belonging and alienation. The book advances scholarship on nationalism and affect by suggesting to study nationalisms not as given, but as potential and emergent experiences of differently positioned bodies in a world divided into nations.

The purpose of the report is to: - review and analyze forestry and climate change policies, institutions, governance, regulations, technical assistance, capacity building and communication with a particular focus on the pilot countries. - evaluate the new challenges, opportunities and constraints posed by climate change to forest management in the pilot countries - identify if and how forest managers are adjusting their management practices to accommodate climate change considerations and what changes they might make in the near and medium term - identify gaps in knowledge, policies or regulations required for adequate management responses to climate change.

Moving beyond existing approaches that largely deal with the biophysical consequences of climate change realities in Africa, this book explores an alternative perspective that traces climate change as a travelling idea. It focuses on how globally constructed discourses on climate change find their way to the local level in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, thereby seeking to understand how these discursive practices lead to social transformations, and to new configurations of power. In the translation process from the global to the local level a continuous modification and appropriation of the idea of climate change takes place that finally leads to a concrete implementation of climate change related projects and sensitization campaigns. Hence, it is argued that in this increasingly interconnected and mediated world people in Africa (and elsewhere in the world) do not solely adapt to a changing climate, but also adapt to a changing discourse about the climate. Travelling between traditional rulers and their palaces, to the world of NGOs, journalists and ordinary farmers this study brings the reader on a captivating journey, that reveals how climate change engages in a variety of ways with different lifeworlds, revitalizes local cosmologies, gives birth to a new development paradigm, and moreover how it evokes apocalyptic anxieties and trajectories of blame at the grassroots level.

This collection showcases experiences from research and field projects in climate change adaptation on the African continent. It includes a set of papers presented at a symposium held in Addis Abeba in February 2016, which brought together international experts to discuss “fostering African resilience and capacity to adapt.” The papers introduce a wide range of methodological approaches and practical case studies to show how climate change adaptation can be implemented in regions and countries across the continent. Responding to the need for more cross-sectoral interaction among the various stakeholders working in the field of climate change adaptation, the book fosters the exchange of information on best practices across the African continent.