Juliane Schumacher

This project seeks to explore how climate change informs coastal planning and development in Senegal, West Africa, and the knowledge(s), predictions, narratives and movements involved. Consequences of global warming are already affecting livelihoods in West Africa, leading to an entanglement of 'actual' experience and model-based predictions of rising sea levels, salinization of river estuaries and declining fish stocks. At the same time, both international and regional actors like Morocco, in its role as a 'leader' in green development, are trying to "mainstream" climate mitigation and adaptation into the process of planning and coastal and regional development, altering regional economic dynamic and negotiating different development paths. Drawing on theory and methods from Political Ecology, Environmental Anthropology and Science and Technology, this project aims at studying these developments to explore the relation between different forms of knowledge(s) related to climate change, imaginaries of the future and the material infrastructures, practices and movements they inform as.