Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

This paper examines the impact of women’s political representation on deforestation rates in Brazil. Using close election regression discontinuity design, we show that women, when elected to office, are more likely to drive improved environmental outcomes due to factors such as reduced access to corrupt networks that influence the enforcement of environmental laws at the local level. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that women’s political representation significantly reduces deforestation rates in the Brazil.

This event is hybrid, to attend remotely register at the ticket link.

Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

The last five years have illuminated our growing global interconnectedness: from the pandemic to volatile food prices and shortages to global tech outages. As we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century, the twin threats of climate change and conflict are now converging with urgent global consequences for all: destruction of food systems and livelihoods; mass displacement and migration; and fierce competition over depleting natural resources. This convergence has unraveled decades of progress and strained our global systems to their breaking point. It is no coincidence that the world’s most worrisome hotspots are mired in conflict alongside the worst real-time impacts of climate change. Our hotter and more hostile world requires a bold new agenda for a shared humanity. Neither conflict nor climate change can be ignored or addressed by individual nations acting alone and in self-interest. Neither can we address climate change or conflict separately, as if they are somehow disconnected global challenges with divergent impacts and solutions. We must come together and partner with those most impacted by conflict and on the frontlines of climate change to forge innovative, cross-sector solutions born from communities themselves to build a better world where everyone can thrive.

In my new book project, “Contested Icescapes, Land, Politics, and Change on an Arctic Agricultural Frontier,” I explore how marginal Arctic land is being imagined as a new frontier for agriculture under climate change, and what the implications are for rural and Indigenous lands, livelihoods, and governance. In this talk, I will discuss a chapter of the book that examines the political history of agriculture in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and its development alongside recent climate crises in the territory. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2021-3, I will discuss how Sambaa K’e First Nation and Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation are transforming agriculture from a settler-colonial tool of assimilation into an exercise of Indigenous sovereignty. How do these Dehcho First Nations communities make meaning of and assert authority over colonial projects? And what are the possibilities of climate adaptation more broadly, if we recognize Indigenous sovereignty in syncretic land use practices?

"A Visual Narrative of Labour Migration and the Environment"
In conversation with:
Kate Beaton, Cartoonist; Writer; Illustrator; Author, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.

Katie Mazer, Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Acadia University.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

Join the Weatherhead Center Canada Program for their Canada Seminar featuring Emma Gilheany, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program, and Affiliate, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP).

Abstract: In this talk, I explore an analytic I have developed called cryo nullius—where icy scapes are perceived by settlers as spectacular, vast, and un-peopled. This perception allows for the conditions of infrastructural violence to manifest in the circumpolar north. I focus in particular on Cold War-era US Air Force radar bases that spanned the circumpolar north as well as present-day Inuit environmental practices to avoid toxicity that has seeped into the land and water from these ruins of technological excess. I argue that Nunatsiavummiut reject this colonial perception of and violence on their sovereign land through the specific materiality of the sub-Arctic. This work is a highly collaborative multi-modal anthropology that engages evidence including archaeological survey, ethnographic research, Inuit oral histories, and archives produced by Inuit governments, missionaries, and the USAF. This project foregrounds Nunatsiavummiut future-making to critique erasures of Indigenous politics and specific environmental harms in discourses of the climate crisis and Anthropocene.