Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ecological Governance and the Dynamics of Risk and Resilience

了解应对灾难性环境事件的风险动态和复原力的努力往往侧重于生活在易受海平面上升影响的低洼沿海地区的人口。因此，这些社区越来越倾向于成为开发治理方法的实验室，以最好地管理、测量和解释潜在的有害大气现象。然而，其中许多社区长期以来不得不应对并制定有效的决策制度，以应对这种季节性天气影响。该项目训练研究生进行严谨的、以经验为基础的科学实地考察，探索在沿海居民和气象学家之间流传的实践和知识之间的相互作用，以及在气候脆弱性背景下建立的最新生态治理机制。该项目还将通过向从事确定评估和应对与灾难性环境事件有关的风险的有效模式的组织、官员和科学家广泛传播研究结果，增进科学理解。在斯坦福大学Sharika Thiranagama博士的指导下，Dilshanie Perera将探索气象知识是如何在经常经历天气灾害的背景下产生和传播的。为此，该项目侧重于通过人类尺度的有形天气经验对气候进行统计抽象。这项研究在孟加拉国进行，这是一个低洼的三角洲国家，每年都面临季节性风暴、季风降雨、旋风和洪水。孟加拉国现在被誉为气候变化的中心，已成为全球发展倡议的实验室，试图率先开展气候救援工作。随着气候变化成为组织和国家干预西南沿海人民生活和生计的主要理由，自上而下的方式用气候习语表达风险，往往会模糊那些世代生活在不稳定景观中环境不确定性中的人的经历。这项研究努力分析生活在潜在灾难性天气下的日常经历。本研究通过询问孟加拉国生态风险的新制度如何采取话语、程序化和物质形式，探讨了关于天气的知识如何在不同尺度上产生，以及天气如何构成治理和管理问题。通过与孟加拉国国家气象学家、沿海农民、地方政府官员和发展实践者进行民族志研究，该项目将为分析灾害反复发生的条件下的环境治理和社会生活提供新的方法。

Efforts to understand the dynamics of risk and resilience in response to catastrophic environmental events often tend to focus on populations living in low-lying coastal areas vulnerable to rising sea levels. As a result, these communities have increasingly tended to become laboratories for developing methods of governance to best manage, measure, and account for potentially hazardous atmospheric phenomena. Many of these communities, however, have long had to cope with and develop effective decision-making regimes in response to such seasonal weather effects. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, explores the interaction between the practices and knowledge that has been circulated among coastal residents and meteorologists, and the more recent apparatus of ecological governance that has been instituted in such contexts of climatic vulnerability. The project would also enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating findings to organizations, officials, and scientists engaged in identifying effective models for assessing and coping with risk associated with catastrophic environmental events.Dilshanie Perera, under the supervision of Dr. Sharika Thiranagama of Stanford University, will explore how meteorological knowledge is produced and circulated in a context where weather-borne disaster are regularly experienced. To do so, this project focuses on the statistical abstraction of climate through the tangible experience of weather at a human scale. The research takes place in Bangladesh, a low-lying deltaic country that faces seasonal storms, monsoon rains, cyclones, and flooding on a yearly basis. Now heralded as the epicenter of climate change, Bangladesh has become a laboratory for global development initiatives trying to pioneer climate relief efforts. As climate change becomes the primary justification for organizational and state intervention into people's lives and livelihoods along the southwest coast, top-down ways of articulating risk in the idiom of climate tend to obscure the experiences of those who have been living with environmental uncertainty in unstable landscapes for generations. This research strives to analyze what the everyday experience of living with potentially catastrophic weather entails. By asking how a new regime of ecological risk takes discursive, programmatic, and material form in Bangladesh, this study explores how knowledge about weather is produced at various scales, as well as how weather is framed a problem of governance and management. By conducting ethnographic research with Bangladesh state meteorologists, coastal farmers, local government officials, and development practitioners, this project will contribute new ways of analyzing environmental governance and social life amid conditions saturated by the recurrent possibility of disaster.