Boosting Resilience in the Fight against Climate Change in the South Caucasus and Central Asia: a Post-Development Deconstruction of the EU’s Approach to Climate Resilience

The South Caucasus and Central Asia are among the most vulnerable regions in the world to the effects of climate change. These are set to become more pervasive during the next few decades, with more frequent and intense heat extremes, uncertain precipitation patterns and further glacial melting. Across these two regions, the European Union (EU) has initiated programmes and projects aimed at boosting climate resilience of local societies and communities by increasing their adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its consequences. Drawing on post-development thinking, this paper critically deconstructs the EU’s approach to climate resilience in the South Caucasus andCentral Asia. Based on a critical discourse analysis of EU policy documents and EU-funded initiatives for climate resilience in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, the paper finds that, by promoting localised solutions that shift responsibility onto the local communities, EU resilience-building depoliticizes climate change adaptation by disregarding the multi-scalar power relations and constraints that local vulnerable communities face in grappling with climate change, such as colonial legacies, disadvantaged place in the local and/or global political economy, dispossession generated by land privatisation and extractivism. While acknowledging that climate adaptation initiatives are a necessary and urgent matter for vulnerable communities in the region, the paper argues that the EU’s neo-liberal, depoliticised approach to climate resilience as a set of techno-economic measures merely facilitates the creation of resilient subjects who try to accommodate to the status quo rather than contesting it and imagining an alternative. By engaging with alternative vocabularies and local struggles for environmental, social and climate justice emerging from these regions, the paper calls for the need for a more transformational approach to climate resilience that integrates adaptation into a broader climate justice framework based on ideas of equity and fairness.