Urban climate resilience under racial capitalism: Governing pluvial flooding across Amsterdam and Dhaka

Abstract

This paper situates climate resilience as a solution to urban flooding under racial capitalism by examining its implementation across Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. The necessity for cities to enhance their climate resilience in the face of urban flooding has become a dominant refrain in the global governance of climate change. This is the case in both the Netherlands and Bangladesh, locations that are respectively and divergently framed as global “masters” of water management and needy “apprentices” requiring international guidance on flood control and economic development. I place these two sites in conversation with one another to break down constructed ontological and epistemological divides across the global North and global South, drawing attention to the relationship between contemporary urban climate resilience policies and broader histories of socio-ecological injustice under racial capitalism. I argue that urban climate resilience policies across Amsterdam and Dhaka renegotiate and reconfigure techniques, practices and ideologies of racial and class-based inequality in response to threats and insecurity posed by climate change within and across urban scales. Looking across Amsterdam and Dhaka, I demonstrate that climate resilience policies primarily aim to protect status quo forms of capital accumulation at the urban scale rather than enact comprehensive climate adaptation measures. As a result, the ineffective and inequitable nature of resilience continues to support highly racially uneven urban socio-natures across the global North and global South, enabled by racist imaginaries where communities in the global South – particularly the urban poor – are framed as being undeserving of environmental justice.