Search

This paper contrasts knowledge frames for climate change and displacement. First the paper explains the abstract human rights arguments about displacement in climate change and disaster. In contrast, management and claims under lawsuits about climate change and displacement are place-based. The paper then draws on data about knowledge and management strategies in a particular place in the United States, and on a close reading of legal reasoning in a post-disaster domestic housing case in the United States. The paper relies on interpretive methods. Although legal reasoning is often represented as distinctive in how it transforms stories into decisions, it shares characteristics with other forms of policy reasoning. Institutional reasoning transforms the “existential threat” of climate change into managed parts. The paper argues that intervening concerning climate change and displacement requires shifting from broad claims in the drama of climate change and rights to following tactics logical within particular institutions. Este artículo realiza un contraste entre marcos de conocimiento para el cambio climático y el desplazamiento de la población. Primero, explica los argumentos abstractos sobre derechos humanos; por contra, la gestión y las reclamaciones judiciales sobre cambio climático y desplazamiento se basan en el lugar. A continuación, se parte de datos sobre estrategias de conocimiento y gestión en un lugar concreto, y de una cuidadosa lectura del razonamiento jurídico en un caso sobre vivienda post-desastre. Nos basamos en métodos interpretativos. A pesar de que a menudo se presenta como rasgo distintivo del razonamiento jurídico el transformar historias en decisiones, comparte características con otros tipos de razonamiento de políticas. El razonamiento institucional transforma la “amenaza existencial” del cambio climático en partes gestionadas. Se argumenta que, para intervenir sobre el cambio climático y el desplazamiento, es necesario pasar de reclamaciones generales a tácticas lógicas dentro de instituciones concretas.Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1064

Climate change is a wicked problem, a framework not often used in sociolegal studies. The problem is complex, not readily named, and not limited to one jurisdiction. Therefore, the places of law are multiple: human rights instruments, supranational tribunals, regional courts, and local governments and NGOS. Litigation concerning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions has largely not resulted in favorable judgments, and the papers in this collection turn to other ways of conceptualizing law and courts in responding to climate change. Relevant legal strategies include environmental legal enforcement, but also changes in investment, and response to the many disasters that are related to climate change. The papers in this collection travel across jurisdictions, actors and problems to assess legal strategies concerning climate change. El cambio climático es un problema perverso, un marco poco usado en los estudios sociojurídicos. El problema es complejo, de difícil denominación, y no está limitado a una sola jurisdicción. Por lo tanto, el derecho tiene muchos espacios: instrumentos de derechos humanos, tribunales supranacionales, juzgados regionales y gobiernos y ONG locales. Los litigios sobre responsabilidades por emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero no han solido acabar con veredictos favorables, y los artículos de esta colección miran hacia otras formas de conceptualizar el derecho y los tribunales como respuesta al cambio climático. Estrategias legales importantes incluyen la aplicación del derecho, pero también cambios en inversiones y respuestas a los múltiples desastres relacionados con el cambio climático. Los artículos de este número navegan por varias jurisdicciones, agentes y problemas para valorar las estrategias jurídicas sobre cambio climático. Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1059

Extreme events are the occasion for many people’s encounters with climate change. Though causation is complex and no one event is directly attributable to climate change, when we consider Cassandra, we can consider what people encounter in assistance after an extreme event. This chapter takes the case of assistance to displaced people after Katrina to explore how care and surveillance were intertwined. Methods include analysis of government documents as well as interviews. When we consider assistance people receive, we often focus on the intended assistance and how it worked or did not. Evaluation is difficult, not least because criteria for determining what it means to work are uncertain. However, if we include the process of gaining assistance as part of the experience, we broaden concerns from the instrumental outcomes to the mixed messages people get in assistance. Assistance appears in a context, where the most vulnerable people have reasons to mistrust government and nonprofits, and where in the United States assistance has come intertwined with supervisory rules, a focus on getting people to work, and a need to manage criminal histories. Trust in government may be limited, emergency care can operate outside ordinary legal frameworks when providers are new, and legal accountability for assistance may be experienced as confining, despite caregivers’ intent.

Disasters are globally inflected today in humanitarian assistance, the organizations that support people after disaster and operate globally, and in the mobilization of arguments international human rights arguments. The domestic bureaucratic processes of humanitarian assistance after disaster in the United States do not state these connections; after Hurricane Katrina in the United States, they were most evident in the people and organizations that helped, and in the flow of humanitarian assistance from around the world that paid for assistance. Second, domestic documents for claiming assistance must limit that assistance to people hurt in disaster. That means they assist people who claim to be away from home temporarily and displaced by disaster. Therefore, the documents require that people claim to wish to go home. However, when those who assisted believed return was unlikely, documents also managed expectations about return by asking after practical, material support for returning home, attempting to dampen clients’ longing for home. This article relies on interviews and bureaucratic documents used after Katrina to explore global subjectivities for assistance, and the management of emotions.