Climate Change and the Postcolonial

Undisputedly, climate change is among the major contemporary challenges worldwide. As the changes in the environment caused by climate change are massively impacting on the overall conditions of social life, climate change has also become a major factor in the further development of societies worldwide. In this sense, climate change has been rightfully called a planetary phenomenon that is affecting any society, group, and individual on global scale alike. Thus, climate change is impacting on food security and water accessibility; it is acting on processes of migration, national and transnational; it is altering social and, even more, material infrastructure; it is shaping the increase and radicalization of social inequality; last not least, it raises the question of which socio-cultural order, respectively which political system will be adequate to meet the meanwhile seriously felt threat of a changing world by the impact of climate change. To this background, for the longest time climate change as global reality has been perceived as the one planetary challenge in light of which a sort of global equity is provided. The planetary-wide impending disaster is thus seen to produce a new quality of equal affectedness to which only the whole planet can respond in cooperative effort. However, of course, the narrative of global equity in the face of climate change is rather problematic in itself as so far neither the phenomenon of climate change, nor transnational institutions or measures have been able or willing to transform this planetary challenge into a new self-understanding of global equity. On the contrary, climate change is on many levels contributing to a deepening of the existing divide between the Global North and the Global South. Existing dependencies, structures of domination and influence, and positions of global hegemony are not coming to an end, they are not transformed into new practices and relations on global scale. Instead, the existing realities often are not only preserved, but also massively deepened. Global and transnational politics and institutions have shown this again only recently during COP27 in Egypt when provision of sufficient financial resources for the Global South has, again, been widely disputed and only reluctantly taken up by countries from the Global North. (...) To this background, the proposed volume considers it important to reflect on the postcolonial signature in climate change knowledge, communication, and measures, with special emphasis on South Africa and the southern African region. Therefore, this book will bring focus on expertise from the social sciences, cultural studies, and humanities.