Disaster management practitioners and researchers have alighted on neoliberal security strategies to combat mounting disaster losses and environmental uncertainties said to threaten sustainable development. Techniques such as community-based disaster management and catastrophe insurance hold out the promise of creating resilient, self- organizing social and environmental systems that autonomously adapt to environmental change in ways that preserve existing socio-ecological order. However, even as applied and critical research on disaster management, vulnerability reduction, and resilience has grown considerably since the 1990s, few analyses have confronted the cultural and political dimensions of these techniques’ cultural and political effects. Indeed, risk reduction and resilience are commonly approached as unproblematic and apolitical activities that merely develop new and better ways to minimize environmental insecurity.
This dissertation seeks to challenge the depoliticization of risk reduction and resilience programming through a genealogy of disaster management in Jamaica. The acategorical and anti-essentialist approach a genealogy entails allows me to destabilize “common sense” assumptions that undergird disaster management practice and create a new space for thinking environmental politics in an interconnected and emergent world. Drawing on fieldwork I conducted from June to December 2009 with Jamaica’s national disaster management agency, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), I show how the confluence of political, economic, scientific, and ecological crises in the Jamaican context has produced mutations in sovereignty and biopower that allow these modes of power to govern life in the socio-ecological emergency that defines neoliberalism. Sovereign power over emergent life is expressed through the decision on adaptation. This is a decision enacted through a new subject of environmental politics, diffuse and decentralized networks that I have called “adaptation machines”. Adaptation machines operate through biopolitical techniques of population control to appropriate the population’s constituent adaptive capacity and direct it towards securing existing socio-ecological order. Rethinking the object, subject, and function of politics as such combats the depoliticization of environmental politics by demonstrating how adaptation is essentially a political practice of forging new socio-ecological futures in an emergent environment. The creative adaptations in which individuals and communities engage are properly political acts that embody the potential to fashion social and ecological life anew out of the suffocating catastrophe of neoliberal order.