Jan Selby, Gabrielle Daoust and Clemens Hoffman. 2022. Divided environments: An international political ecology of climate change, water and security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781009106801 (ebook, 35€)/ ISBN: 978-1-009-10760-0 (paperback, 30€).
(URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/divided-environments/0621F20A4464C4E05BF76980BBF25D3F)
Larry A. Swatuk
University of Waterloo, lswatuk@uwaterloo.ca
To cite this Review: Swatuk, L. (2023). Review of “Divided Environments An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security”, Cambridge University Press 2022, by Jan Selby, Gabrielle Daoust, and Clemens Hoffmann, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/345-divided
Divided Environments is an iconoclastic tour de force that is refreshing, compelling and creative. At issue is the idea that ‘it is resource scarcities and their socio-economic, especially migration, consequences which are viewed as the key “intervening variables” between global climate change and worsening instability’ (pp. 4, 306). ‘In contrast’, the authors argue, ‘it is historically configured human agency in the division - and also the exploitation, transformation, destruction, appropriation, distribution and commodification - of environmental spaces and resources that lies at the core of the environmental insecurity problematique’ (p.29).
Over ten chapters, the authors convincingly demonstrate that ‘the conflict and security implications of climate change are very different from those typically imagined within the climate security orthodoxy’ (p.9). In support of their argument, Selby, Daoust and Hoffman focus primarily on five ‘divided environments’ — Cyprus; Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; Lake Chad region; Sudan and South Sudan; and Syria. Divided environments are conceptualized as physical spaces occupied by human communities that, through time, have become divided politically, socially, racially, environmentally (p. 26-27). The cases and places chosen for investigation constitute what are commonly considered to be ‘hot spots’ of instability, and feature regularly in academic, policy and media discourses as ‘hard cases’ most likely to suffer ‘water wars’ and ‘climate chaos’. The authors use water as the lens through which to view real and imagined climate and resource insecurities, with each chapter levelling deep and sustained critique of a particular commonly held belief regarding water (in)security, and its implications for climate change. There are eight substantive chapters: Chapter 2, Geography versus Demography, challenges the veracity of seemingly commonsensical notions of population-determined water scarcity, stress and violent conflict. Chapter 3, Drought, focuses on the ‘incompleteness’ of the drought-conflict narrative. Chapter 4, Others, exposes the racist foundation of resource insecurity in theory and practice. Chapter 5, Hydraulics, examines five contradictions of hydraulic development, while Chapter 6, Frontiers, highlights the hubris of modernization theory’s ‘new horizons for development’. Chapter 7, War, challenges Realist discourses, while Chapter 8, Peace, takes on Liberal Institutionalist beliefs and practices. Chapter 9, Transformations and Circulations, exposes the ‘luminous obviousness’ (p.272) of nexus thinking (e.g. WEF Nexus, virtual water flows) before proposing several nexuses of their own. Chapter 10, Conclusion, presents ten theses on water insecurity along with five conclusions about climate and insecurity. The text is complemented by a useful set of maps.
The book is not organized as a linear argument with each chapter building on its predecessor. Rather, each chapter may be read independently of the rest, taking a unique point of departure to address a common theme: that dominant narratives are not to be trusted. Each chapter provides a treasure trove of one liners, bon mots, and withering take-downs of mainstream tropes and truisms: ‘Water is not life’ (p.40ff), but rather a capitalist commodity. The demographic-climate chaos nexus mirrors Malthusianism which ‘is a zombie theory’, constantly disproved but always ‘rising from the dead’ (p.54, Chapter 2). The drought-conflict narrative is ‘a recurring eco-determinist problem of misplaced localism’ (p.76); ‘Droughts in the modern world are always playthings in the service of power’ (p.100, Chapter 3). ‘Racism and colonialism in thought and practice make the modern world and thereby make and remake vulnerabilities’ (p.105, Chapter 4). Far from a panacea, ‘water infrastructure motivated by fears of climate insecurity will create winners and losers’ (p.141), exacerbating local forms of ‘dislocation, destruction, discrimination, danger and dependency (and new vulnerabilities)’ (p. 158ff, Chapter 5). Problematically, the climate change narrative is creating new frontier lands where ‘water is effectively the new soil; the attribute that most gives value to land and which most makes land worth commodifying, appropriating, developing and fighting over’ (p.207, Chapter 6). Far from a result of physical changes wrought by climate, water related conflicts and insecurities reflect ‘projects of state-building and development’, themselves being the result of ‘political and political-economic interests, structures and agendas both in the core and at the frontier/periphery’ (p.170, Chapter 6). War has always been ‘a contradictory process’, simultaneously ‘destructive and productive’. Water security and insecurity, therefore, ‘can only be understood through organized political violence and its legacies’ over time (p.236, Chapter 7). If war offers a mixed picture, so too does peace. Challenging the premises of liberal internationalism, the authors argue that the promises of environmental peace building are ‘not merely hollow; they mirror and reproduce the characteristic eco-determinism of environmental conflict discourse, just in the opposite direction’ (p.267, Chapter 8). Regarding analytical frameworks, ‘reflecting its roots in the world of policy, nexus discourse is much more normative than analytical in content, jumping quickly to offering Neo-liberal answers but providing only the most superficial — and in certain respects misleading — explanations (p. 272, Chapter 9). A similar critique is levelled at ‘virtual water’ whose ‘biggest problem … is that the structure of the global virtual water trade is organized less around a logic of scarcity than around patterns of development, affluence and power’ (p. 275, Chapter 9). Thus, ‘so long as these basic principles and imperatives [of capitalist accumulation] remain unchanged … then forms of water-related expropriation, dispossession, inequality, vulnerability and degradation … will follow’ (p. 297, Chapter 9).
For scholars of critical political ecology, geography, water studies and so on, much of the intellectual terrain covered is common ground. From a critical scholar’s perspective, while each chapter’s critique is astonishingly obvious, amassed together they constitute a compelling and damning indictment of most Western policy and academic theory related to the ‘climate crisis’. This gives rise to the question, what is to be done? Typical of critical scholarly endeavor, the authors are long on insight but short on recommendations for action. Indeed, there is one short section on ‘resistance and resilience’ (pp. 201-205) and a half-sentence near to the end of the book where they point out quite rightly that a great deal of critical political ecology works in support of localized action and community-based resistance (p. 323). The final sentence of the book argues that rather than try to find solutions to environmental and climate conflict, we should actively embrace them as ‘practical political necessities’. While perhaps true in certain contexts, it leaves the reader wondering how to begin.
