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Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha “It won't be any good to have democracy if we don’t have a country”: Climate change and the politics of synecdoche in the Maldives Eric Hirsch The University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, United States A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Received 13 June 2015 Received in revised form 28 August 2015 Accepted 8 September 2015 Available online xxx Critical attention has recently turned to the climate change “synecdoche”: a place uniquely exposed to the environmental consequences of climate crisis, such as sea-level rise, that becomes a stand-in for the global crisis as a whole and a harbinger of more widespread disaster. The Maldives, which scientists, politicians, and activists predict could be completely submerged by 2100, filled that role between the 2008 inauguration of Mohamed Nasheed, the country's first democratically elected president after years of authoritarian rule, and his 2012 ouster. This ethnography of the Maldivian challenge to climate change asks how claiming a geopolitical identity as the world’s “canary in the coalmine” fostered an emerging internal political culture. I argue that arming climate change solutions became a state-making device in the Maldives, whose fragile coral atoll ecosystem itself became the synecdoche of a young democracy. Between 2008 and 2012, how was environmental knowledge creation understood as a democratic activity? To answer this question, I draw on ethnographic interview testimony and participant-observation in Malé, the Maldivian capital, with politicians, activists, and city residents, as well as an analysis of the Nasheed administration’s public rhetoric. The article centers on the case of Bluepeace, the country’s oldest environmental NGO, which has seen significant international publicity. Following Bluepeace’s efforts to help the Maldives achieve carbon neutrality by 2020—part of Nasheed’s plan to end global climate change through exemplary national sacrifice—this article finds that climate problem solving and democracy were put to work for one another through small-scale mitigation and adaptation experiments. ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Climate change Geopolitical identity Politics of knowledge Democracy Environmentalism Maldives 1. Introduction Aspiring to show the world a picture of the future it may soon inherit, Mohamed Nasheed, recently elected president of the Maldives, held the world’s first-ever underwater cabinet meeting in October 2009. Equipped with SCUBA gear, Nasheed and his ministers gathered twenty feet beneath the Indian Ocean’s surface to sign a declaration urging world leaders to commit to greenhouse gas mitigation at the upcoming Copenhagen climate conference (Fig. 1). The meeting was coordinated by 350.org, an international campaign for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions to an atmospheric concentration of 350 ppm. This was at once a smart photo opportunity, sure to be covered in major media, and a declaration of “war:” an ethical war against carbon-dioxide, in which the Maldives would become carbon-neutral by 2020. The administration claimed that, according to the 2007 IPCC report, failure to take dramatic planetary action would result in rising sea levels, rendering low-lying island nations like the Maldives uninhabitable—or in Nasheed’s words, cause them to “die” (Nasheed, 2009a)—by as soon as 2100. At two meters, this atoll nation has one of the world’s lowest maximum elevations, with much of its inhabited land just above sea level (Maniku, 1990). Its 400,000-inhabitant population dwarfs other small island nations, allowing leaders to argue that the Maldives’ disappearance would represent unprecedented global crisis.1 What did making this dramatic argument about climate crisis mean within the Maldives? Recent scholarship has analyzed climate change’s capacity to reshape planetary politics (Chakrabarty, 2009; Eckersley, 2007; Jasanoff, 2010). This article asks what assuming a geopolitical identity as the world’s living measure of climate change meant for a nation-state’s internal political culture, in a rare moment when it weighed so heavily in a president’s discourse. Climate change here was more than simply an urgent problem 1 Compare Tuvalu (pop.11,000) and Kiribati (pop.100,000). CIA World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/countrytemplate_mv.html. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.09.008 0959-3780/ ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 191 We must unite in a world war effort to halt further temperature rises. Climate change is happening and it threatens the rights and security of everyone on Earth. We have to have a better deal. We should be able to come out with an amicable understanding that everyone survives. If Maldives can’t be saved today, we do not feel that there is much of a chance for the rest of the world. (Mail Foreign Service, 2009) Fig. 1. The declaration signed by the Maldivian cabinet during the October, 2009 underwater meeting (Mail Foreign Service, 2009). for an environmentally vulnerable country. Instead, I argue in this article that climate change became a state-making device. Through the Maldivian claim to be the climate change “synecdoche” (Connell, 2003), the country’s coral atoll ecosystem became a synecdoche for the fragile democratic political culture to which the new administration aspired. To discern the significance of the Maldives’ global environmental project for its internal politics, this study analyzes the Nasheed administration’s rhetoric, and ethnographic testimony from activists affiliated with Bluepeace—the country’s oldest environmental NGO, policymakers, educators, and other Maldivian citizens. This climate-based political project was in part an attempted post-authoritarian reboot of Maldivian nationalism. It came on the heels of President Maumoon Gayoom's thirty-year rule, emerging in 2008 in the excitement and uncertainty of the first democratic election most Maldivians had ever experienced. “It won’t be any good to have democracy,” Nasheed warned shortly after that election, “if we don’t have a country” (Shenk, 2012). In a speech to the UN, Nasheed described the Maldives as the world's “canary in the coalmine” (Nasheed, 2009a; see also Farbotko, 2010; Hamblyn, 2009). He then declared that the Maldives would become the world’s first carbon-neutral nation, helping “point the way out of the mine” (Nasheed, 2009a). In taking on this new geopolitical identity, citizens were encouraged to experiment with small-scale solutions for emissions reduction, which amounted to a new form of democratic engagement. Bluepeace’s director Adil Hussein suggested in an interview that concrete local examples of climate intervention could be crucial to addressing the global crisis: “I think Maldives is much more successful than the IPCC or any of those organizations at raising awareness.” Maldivian democratic aspirations, in other words, were mediated by the mutual constitution, or “coproduction,” of science and ethics (Jasanoff, 2004; , 2010). This co-production rendered Maldivian territory uniquely available as a concrete example of environmental urgency, and as a laboratory for scientific innovators with both formal and informal civic credentials to enact their democratic citizenship by experimenting with emissions reduction strategies. This article takes the years between Nasheed’s 2008 election and his abrupt resignation in 2012 as an ethnographic snapshot of one political community’s efforts to intervene in a planetary crisis. Below, I detail the study's methodology, and follow that section with a consideration of scholarly approaches to the intersection of climate science and climate politics. I then describe the Maldivian context, turning to an analysis of the Nasheed administration's climate narratives and my ethnographic documentation of the country's democratic spirit of scientific activism. 2. Methodology This piece centers on ethnographic interview testimony from 40 semi-structured interviews and participant-observation conducted in 2011 on the islands constituting the Malé metropolitan area: Malé island itself, the nearby rural community on Vilingili island, and the newly constructed residential island of Hulhumale. Because of the country’s political volatility, ethics in data collection were of utmost importance to this research. All interview subjects except for the Minister of State (who gave his permission to be named) were rendered anonymous for the purposes of this article, even though many interview subjects are known public figures. I use pseudonyms, do not include dates, and minimize identifying characteristics. All subjects provided their consent to be recorded and permission to publish their views. Subject selection focused on policy and activism circles based on chain referral sampling from the elaborate networks of the Bluepeace NGO’s leadership, which spanned the three islands under study. It also drew on referrals from other well-connected interviewees concerned about climate change (policy experts, merchants, tourism entrepreneurs) I met in parks, cafes, gift shops, and other public places. Because the densely populated Malé island represents the capital's population core, I conducted 25 interviews there, with 8 more on Hulhumale and 7 on Vilingili. My interviews were conducted exclusively with English-speakers, who make up the majority of the Bluepeace NGO members, politicians, and nonelite Maldivians to whom I was able to gain access. Following Arnall and Kothari’s delineation of elite and non-elite Maldivian subjects, I spoke with 32 elites and 8 non-elites (4 in Malé, 2 on Hulhumale, 2 on Vilingili), or Maldivians not affiliated with an NGO, university, or policymaking entity (Arnall and Kothari, 2015). Field research was supplemented by follow-up correspondence with internet-accessible interviewees between 2009 and 2015. In addition to interviews, I observed NGO planning sessions and site visits, meals and conversations between activist colleagues over coffee, and class sessions at the Maldives National University. I would also recruit interview subjects to offer their perspective by leading me on guided tours of Malé's fish and vegetable markets, sea wall construction and dredging projects, mangrove forests, and areas of the city they saw as vulnerable to sea-level rise. Further ethnographic engagement entailed discussions about climate with individuals on the city's streets, outside of mosques, and on the city's inter-island ferries (dhonis). Far from a generalized Maldivian perspective on climate change (cf. Arnall and Kothari, 2015), this piece offers a textured picture of the largely urban, elite project of civil society activism and the politics underlying it during the Nasheed years. With respect to that project, 2011 was a fruitful time to conduct this study’s fieldbased component, affording a conjunctural historical moment in the Maldives. The 2008–2012 Nasheed years were a briefly energetic period of climate change mobilization. At the same time, citizens were excited about the new freedom to critique the government, which since 2012 has become less secure, with climate also losing its position as an executive priority. While interviews and participant-observation were essential to this study, the effort to trace how such an important national theme reoriented ordinary lives also meant understanding the discourses underlying national climate politics in the Maldives from 2008 to 2012. My methodology therefore included collecting and analyzing the Nasheed administration’s public rhetoric and policy documents that addressed the subject. This meant following Nasheed’s public speeches on climate change to international organizations including the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), where the Maldives became a significant moral presence. I also collected climate project reports and policy papers produced by Maldivian initiatives 192 E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 such as Bluepeace and Huvadhoo Aid, and organizations including the UN-based IPCC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. My research, lastly, entailed following local and international media coverage of Maldivian climate politics, from newspapers and documentaries to online message boards. 3. Climate change and geopolitical identity A longstanding environmentalist ethics suggests that the way humans live must change significantly in order to sustain the world’s ecosystems (Brown, 2004), which assumes certainty in climate change knowledge and an ethical program that can be applied to the entire planet. Some environmental scientists and critical theorists characterize the current period as the “anthropocene,” an era of unprecedented human “geological agency” (Chakrabarty, 2009). And the first step for rerouting that agency to resolve the climate crisis, according to 350.org director Bill McKibben, is to recognize it as “the biggest thing that's ever happened” (McKibben, 2010: 46). However, recent literature on the environmental and social science of climate change has critiqued such activist certainty, problematizing its politics of representation and its posited binaries of imperialist polluters and innocent victims (Cameron, 2012; Crate and Nuttall, 2009; Farbotko, 2005; Farbotko and Lazrus, 2011; Kothari, 2014; Veland et al., 2013). Critics suggest that findings are sometimes selectively presented to encourage intervention, especially with respect to sea-level rise (Connell, 2003; Hulme, 2008; Kothari, 2014). Even if we follow the IPCC’s direst .59-meter rise projection for 2100 (2007), global sea-level rise is not necessarily synonymous with island decimation (Barnett and Adger, 2003; Nicholls and Cazenave, 2010). Perhaps most remarkably, Webb and Kench’s (2010) longitudinal studies of decades of sea-level rise in 27 coral atoll islands in the central Pacific Ocean—geologically analogous to the Maldives—revealed that 86% of islands studied either retained their original size or increased in area. Such complexity suggests that considerable political mediation was needed to translate IPCC projections into the Maldives’ imminent “death.” The politics of “ecological intervention,” in which one country or multi-national entity resolves environmental problems in another, are also complex (Choo, 2012; Eckersley, 2007). Some scholars even gloss such interventions as imperialist exoticism. Farbotko, for example, draws on Edward Said to argue that islands like Tuvalu have become objects of desire as “spaces of climate change” (Farbotko, 2010: 52). Tuvalu can only be useful for cosmopolitan environmentalists as a moral lesson through its ultimate destruction, a phenomenon Farbotko provocatively calls “wishful sinking.” It is certainly necessary to highlight the toxic dimensions of inhabiting climate change’s “victim slot” (Hughes, 2013: 571). However, victimhood is also generative. In the Maldives, claiming the geopolitical identity of collective victim was not the goal but a point of departure for a longer empowerment story, rooted in the idea that vulnerability to “sinking” on a world stage might infuse established fact with the concern needed for emissions reduction. Put another way, “ethics begins in attention,” as philosopher of science James Griesemer writes (2011). A planetary ethics that would solidify the Maldivian claim to geopolitical identity stood to emerge in the moments the world was asked to direct its attention to the Maldives, whose plight had to be translated from a “matter of fact” to a “matter of concern” (Latour, 2004). Scholars who research knowledge and its circulation suggest that epistemology and ethics are often inextricable (Jasanoff, 2005; Sunder Rajan and Leonelli, 2013); indeed, the act of learning can serve as a particularly important form of ethical engagement in activist projects (Fennell, 2013). This intertwinement is especially clear in the context of climate politics (Demeritt, 2006; Jasanoff, 2010), which calls for extending what Peter Haas calls “epistemic communities”—a network of scientists and experts brought together in moments of political decision-making (Haas, 1992)— to encompass “knowledge brokers” (Litfin, 1995: 255). Yet the distinctions Litfin and others draw between scientists and brokers are blurred when knowledge creation is itself understood as a democratic practice, as is the case for Nasheed’s Maldives: there, the making of an inclusive “epistemic community” became central to the project of a newly democratic “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991; cf. Mitchell, 2011). I understand democratic practice here to mean a citizen's efforts to frame and engage the basic terms of political action, political participation, and political identity, in however small a way (see Cruikshank, 1999; Brown, 2015). During the Nasheed years, I suggest, democratic practice entailed the everyday epistemic and ethical work of tying democracy to the country’s very existence while reinforcing its geopolitical position as climate change synecdoche. For example, Bluepeace volunteers’ efforts to experiment with the Maldivian environment offered a picture of science without scientists, where the distinction between information “producer” and “framer” collapsed in the crucible of democratic aspiration. Maldivian democratic practice also meant actively distinguishing between an era of authoritarianism and one of democracy by an action as basic as, for example, marking one's free critique of the government: during an interview with an environmentalist critical of Nasheed’s carbon neutrality plan who had been jailed during the Gayoom era, he reflected, “Now I can talk to you.” Externally, translating fact into concern meant framing the imminent loss of the Maldives by rhetorically inverting the conventional politics of cultural authenticity, a theme that has long captured anthropological attention (Ivy, 1995; Povinelli, 2002). Instead of forging national identity through longing for a vanishing unadulterated past, authenticity and national uniqueness were the subjects of a vanishing present, evoking what Choy calls “anticipatory nostalgia” (Choy, 2011: 13). The “real” or “authentic” Maldives has not yet disappeared, but will be lost if no action is taken and the country is allowed to become uninhabitable. In the context of climate change mobilization, anticipatory nostalgia affords a more politically generative bottom line than only threatened sovereignty and rights. Indeed, diagnosing something as endangered raises “the stakes in a controversy so that certain actions carry the consequence of destroying the possibility of life's continued existence” (26). Conveying collective endangerment gave climate change mobilization its political force both on the world stage and as a forge for a new national politics. 4. Results and analysis: internalizing geopolitical identity 4.1. Situating climate change in the Maldives The Republic of Maldives occupies a string of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean some 300 miles southwest of India. It was a distant protectorate of various world powers until its 1965 independence from Britain. The smallest Muslim nation and the smallest country in Asia (Jauregui, 2010), it is comprised of 1192 islands administratively divided into twenty-six atolls over an ocean area of about 90,000 square-kilometers (Shaljan, 2004). Almost every island is small enough for the ocean to be visible from any point. The country is a famous resort destination. Should the ocean rise, however, the Maldivian “paradise” could be “lost,” in the words of one western journalist (Bryant, 2004). As Nicholls and Tol indicate, “one of the more certain consequences of human-induced climate change through the twenty-first century is a global-mean rise in sea-level of up to 1 m” (Nicholls and Tol, 2006: 1074; see also IPCC, 2007's more E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 conservative 0.59 m maximum rise estimate). Some climate scientists suggest that the rise “will almost certainly accelerate” (Nicholls and Cazenave, 2010). Though its impacts on low-lying coastal zones and coral atolls remain uncertain, environmentalists have targeted the Maldives as a live warning about environmental and economic precarity, the need for adaptation strategies, and the imminent surge of “climate change refugees” (Docherty and Giannini, 2009). The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 placed the Maldives squarely in the “imagined geography” (Farbotko, 2010) of environmental vulnerability. The tsunami caused so much flooding in the Maldives that nearly all of its islands were completely submerged for several hours (UNICEF, 2006). Thousands were displaced, with 108 people confirmed dead or missing (Lambourne, 2005). Fourteen islands were rendered temporarily uninhabitable; six more were irrevocably destroyed (China Daily, 2005). Economically, the Maldives was the hardest-hit in all of Asia, with losses close to an astounding sixty-two percent of GDP (UNDP, 2010). The tsunami sparked a vigorous disaster preparation effort (Prevention Web, 2009), later recalled in the 2009 underwater cabinet meeting. Though it was caused by an earthquake, the tsunami displayed sea-level rise in fast-forward, as the Maldives’ temporary submergence provided the world a lesson in the potentially devastating impacts of global climate change. That disaster also had important political consequences. In the tsunami’s wake, a mandatory condition of much-needed European aid was that the Gayoom administration implement reforms aimed at increasing transparency and demonstrating a stronger electoral democracy (Shenk, 2009). As a result of these reforms, Mohamed Nasheed, a journalist, repeat political prisoner, and, subsequently, opposition leader, was elected in the October 2008 elections, in what was seen as an exemplary moment of Islamic democracy (Schmidle 2009).2 Before discussing Nasheed’s specific climate agenda in the next subsection, it bears mentioning that the seeming eliteness of Nasheed’s urban globetrotting climate agenda failed to articulate with daily life for many Maldivians (Kothari, 2014; Arnall and Kothari, 2015). Maldivian political culture has long been marked by a tension between city and atolls. The country is heavily urban, with the capital home to 120,000 of the nation's 400,000 people. Beyond Malé and its nearby atolls, national identity is somewhat more tenuous, held together by the Maldivian language, Dhivehi, and Islam, the official religion (no non-Muslim can be a citizen). Though Maldivians are known for moderate Sunni Islam (Jauregui, 2010), the country is not immune to religious fundamentalism: some clerics attributed the 2004 tsunami to lax morals (Schmidle, 2009). Given this context, as in many regions deemed environmentally vulnerable (Veland et al., 2003; Haalboom and Natcher, 2012), climate crisis often pales in comparison to other matters of concern on the ground (Arnall and Kothari, 2015). Development—sustainable and otherwise—remains a dominant value in a resource-poor state that imports nearly all of its everyday goods. Efforts abound to achieve more economically efficient transportation of staple items from the country’s main trade partners, India and Sri Lanka, regardless of the impacts of ships and air traffic (Shaljan, 2004). Meanwhile, sixty-two percent of Maldivians are under the age of twenty-five (Doherty, 2012). With rising fertility rates and improving public health (Shaljan, 2004), the demand for housing, 2 The transition between governments was fluid enough for judges and members of the Peoples’ Majilis (Parliament) loyal to Gayoom’s Progressive Party of the Maldives (PPM) to maintain a hold on power. The PPM regained the presidency from Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) in the November 2013 election, which saw his narrow defeat by Gayoom’s half-brother Abdulla Yameen. 193 jobs, and staple goods may be outstripping supply in much of the country. “Youth” has also become a different kind of policy concern in recent years, with a heroin “epidemic” affecting an estimated 40% of Maldivians below age 25 (Doherty, 2012). The Maldives made some progress in facing these challenges, however, earning South Asia’s highest GDP per capita and graduating in 2011 from Least Developed Country status (UNCTAD, 2011). On February 8, 2012, internal tensions came to a head. Nasheed resigned in the wake of mass protest and mounting political violence, in what he called a “coup”; though the specific circumstances of his departure remain unclear, many Maldivians attributed his administration’s fragile hold on power to its inattention to ordinary development priorities (Al-Jazeera, 2012). Nasheed’s ouster and subsequent return to prison in 2015 (which I detail in the conclusion) illustrate how central climate change was to his presidency, both its rise and its fall. 4.2. New politics: the making of a carbon-neutral nation At forty-two, Nasheed brought an air of youth to his office, vowing to run the country in contrast to his predecessor as the patient warrior for a newly technocratic, ethical governance. Confronting the climate crisis became Nasheed’s key device for fulfilling the promise of a new democratic politics. His rise to the presidency, in his own telling, afforded him a unique perspective on the ecological problems already underway (Shenk, 2012). To be sure, Gayoom had also aired his concerns about climate change in his own speeches to the UN, the Non-Aligned Movement, and other international organizations (Phadnis and Luithui, 1985). But for Gayoom, development remained an internal priority (Hamilton, 2008), starkly contrasting with Nasheed's new emphasis on the collective sacrifice of national carbon neutrality. For the new administration, the notion that climate crisis stood uniquely to affect the Maldives made resolving every other internal crisis, from corruption to housing policy, that much more urgent. Because it takes place in geological time, climate change happens gradually. But transforming a problem into a crisis, as Doane writes, entails “a condensation of temporality. It names an event of some duration which is startling and momentous precisely because it demands resolution within a limited period of time” (Doane, 2006: 252). Deeming climate change a crisis anchors geological time to political time. As Beck argues, “only by imagining and staging world risk does the future catastrophe become present—often with the goal of averting it by influencing present decisions” (Beck, 2009: 10). Crises enable actors to dissolve traditional parameters of political action, and “relativize and circumvent the coordinates and coalitions of national politics” (81– 82). Just before his inauguration in November 2008, Nasheed rhetorically brought the crisis to life with the shocking declaration that in light of projections suggesting the direct threat of sea-level rise to the Maldives, he was preparing to relocate the nation to India, Sri Lanka, or Australia. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own,” he announced, “so we have to buy land elsewhere” (Schmidle, 2009). Four months later, he would unveil his plan to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral state. This apparent inconsistency indexes a context of political activism defined by dramatic (even if contradictory) gestures meant to communicate to the world that climate crisis is, indeed, real. “Buying” new territory was far from ideal, and far from likely. However, publicizing the unprecedented possibility of an entire nation’s migration conjured the urgency of crisis into political life. According to the twelve-year-old Maldivian representative to the Copenhagen Children's Climate Forum, the international community’s choice was between “saving” and “murdering” the Maldives (Democracy Now, 2009). 194 E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 Nasheed announced his national carbon neutrality plan from Malé, networked into the global premiere of The Age of Stupid (Armstrong, 2009), a science fiction-style documentary portraying a series of “flashbacks” on contemporary failures to heed scientists' warnings from the perspective of 2055’s overheated, disasterridden Earth. Of course, Maldivian carbon neutrality would be negligible in terms of the emissions mitigation needed for any significant impact. But this decision to take responsibility showed “those with the least . . . doing the most” (Nasheed, 2009b), backing appeals with concrete and responsible local action. “If man can walk on the moon,” Nasheed proclaimed at the premiere, “we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy” (Schmidle, 2009). In 2010, he was recognized for such efforts, designated “Champion of the Earth” by the UN Environment Program (Restrepo, 2010), affirming the Maldives' temporary prominence on the world stage. Boosted by a public of journalists gazing “partly in horror and partly with perverse impatience” at this “disappearing” nation (Farbotko, 2010: 48), Maldivian leaders and advocates drew on affective resources far deeper than the plea to save disappearing homes and livelihoods. If allowed to “die,” the reasoning there went, the world would lose the country’s cultural and linguistic singularity, its biodiversity, and its claim to paradise, all essential to the national brand and global diversity. Their task was to render that cosmopolitan “impatience” locally useful. One of the narratives into which the new administration tapped for doing so was that of a technocratic, market-based ingenuity. Featuring private initiative and public-private partnerships, the strategy was characterized by appeals to a “free-market frontier ideology” of innovation in a lowregulation space (Sunder Rajan, 2006: 113). Nasheed suggested in 2009 that he supported innovation by “anybody with a mad idea and an investment plan” (Schmidle, 2009). And he argued in a newspaper column “that carbon-neutral development is not just possible, it is profitable” (Nasheed, 2010). In demonstrating an internal resourcefulness harmonious with both democracy and the market, this approach strategically enabled Maldivian leadership to offer the world a compelling story of progress, self-determination, and integrity with respect to emissions. Nasheed complemented his language of neoliberal technocracy with the language of war. The fight against climate change had to be a “world war effort,” a “campaign” to combat the radically shared threat to “security and rights.” Hassan Afeef, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, echoed this rhetoric in an interview. When I asked about climate change, he flatly told me, “It's a national security issue,” implying that this was obvious. The administration offered an inventive twist on war talk: to avoid the “blame game,” they replaced the typical climate change “enemies”—the United States, China, India—with the polluting substance itself, framing the response as a war on CO2. This was a war in which, for the first time, every human could be on the same side. Rhetorically “choreographing” climate change (Swyngedouw, 2010: 214) this way accomplished several things. Transforming “carbon” into the proxy enemy, this language of war relegated climate change to “a terrain beyond dispute” (217), creatively redeploying the conventional “securitizing” idioms of international relations (Eckersley, 2007: 295). War on carbon dioxide organized a nationally unifying sense of urgency: as Carl Schmitt classically argued, delineating “between friend and enemy” is fundamental to the construction of political community (Schmitt, 2007: 26). It also accelerated the crisis' uptake by offering a vocabulary for responsibility at what may be the last minute: climate change was “a clear and present danger,” and “carbon” is “a common enemy” that “knows no boundaries” (Nasheed, 2009b). War, finally, cemented the moral and epistemic legitimacy of a refreshed democratic state and of Nasheed’s presidency. Framing the war-ready Maldives as “the world's conscience on global warming” (Nasheed, 2009a), the Maldivian synecdoche then had to perform a double move: it had to represent its territory as a vulnerable space that “render[ed] global warming visible” (Hamblyn, 2009), and it had to reconfigure that territory as an “active experiment station” (Jasanoff, 2005: 9) where experimentation came to be part of an ethics of carbon-fighting citizenship. If one nation-state’s performance of radical action could motivate the world to look its way, this posturing was even more generative internally, instilling a win-win-style ethics of honest and inclusive governance. The documentary The Island President (Shenk, 2012), for example, features a cabinet meeting in which Nasheed suggests that discarding Gayoom's clientilism was good for both democracy and the environment. Mass participation in the “war effort” was also seen to spur enterprise and civic engagement, and as something that could offer youth an alternative to heroin by integrating them into the national democratic project (Huvadhoo Aid, 2010). My ethnography made clear that the threat of disappearance and the fight to reduce emissions organized an internal sense of shared futurity, occasioning the literal building, reinforcement, and in some cases, rebuilding, of the state’s vanishing territory. Past and impending crisis cast its shadow over everyday life: sea walls loomed at the end of every block in Malé as reminders of the city’s precarity (Fig. 2). This protection dates back at least to 1987, when Japan donated $60 million for the wall after devastating floods (Hamilton, 2008). Artificial islands are also being built, with others undergoing land elevation projects. In 2012, after Nasheed’s resignation, the new vice president Waheed Deen proposed consolidating the population into six protected artificial islands to adapt to future resource shortages (Lubna, 2012). A more recent government proposal entails resettling all Maldivians on ten islands, couching an economic expedient in an idiom of environmental common sense (Kothari, 2014). Though it did generate a growing internal sense of community among elites, carbon neutrality’s potentially drastic impacts on ordinary development gave many others cause for concern (Arnall and Kothari, 2015; see also Petheram et al., 2010; Marino, 2011). According to two merchants I interviewed, the long-term challenge of climate change paled in comparison to the problem of everyday survival. Shahid, a middle-aged owner of several small businesses, and his colleague Jalal, a younger man who ran a gift shop, made clear that they had other worries: mainly, families and businesses that both required imported resources that did not always reach their destinations. Both suggested that they would be more hurt than helped in the short-run by the national push for carbon neutrality. Jamila, a hotel proprietor, echoed this worry. A Fig. 2. A sea wall along one of Malé island's coastal roads. E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 group of students I interviewed on a dhoni associated climate change more with the pleasure of predicting the apocalypse—they referenced the coming end of the Mayan long-count calendar in 2012—than with something concrete action could address. The Republic’s import dependence meant that the global recession and chronic shortages dealt harsh blows to daily livelihood in 2011. The idea of theoretically preventing disaster through national emissions exemplarity had costs in the present few Maldivians I encountered were willing to bear. Even some of the Bluepeace associates I interviewed were skeptical about carbon neutrality, despite the fact that many of their projects formally took place under that plan's rubric. Cofounder Ibrahim Azam told me that with this effort, Nasheed was “trying to be mainstream.” Seeing it as a distraction, he went on to say, “I'm not into the whole carbon-neutral thing” which might work “as a model, but look at the cost—it’s expensive.” Director Adil Hussein suggested that most Maldivians would not be interested in carbon neutrality. “Our rhetoric is different from the reality,” he explained. “The reality is that we go around in Malé in motorbikes, just for fun, burning the petrol.” Yet from the perspective of Maldivian leaders, the mission to translate the “rhetoric” of carbon neutrality into “reality” stood to light the metaphorical canary's pathway out of the mine. The next section considers the push to experiment as a form of democratic engagement. 4.3. Scientific action as democratic practice If the Maldives represented “the world’s conscience on global warming,” Bluepeace was the official environmental conscience of the Maldives. A small network of young volunteers in Malé founded the NGO in 1989, which seeks to use education as a tool for protecting the environment. Its key objectives are “to increase awareness, understanding and knowledge among people of the Maldives about [the] global environment,” “to carry out research, build environmental monitoring and management skills,” and “to initiate and carry out activities and projects at different levels in the Maldives for the protection of our delicate environment”; the organization is also explicitly focused on “all those little things that we could do together to save our environment for the future generations” (Bluepeace, 2011). While its small national network of 30–50 volunteers is engaged in a variety of conservation efforts, awareness campaigns, and knowledge-generating activities, in 2011 Bluepeace became one of the key civil society organizations tasked with carrying out the Nasheed administration’s carbon neutrality mission. Its leaders, at the time, were closely aligned with the president and his Maldivian Democratic Party, with some having protested and spent time in prison alongside Nasheed before his election. Bluepeace is also an internationally recognized NGO, widely quoted by journalists as a source of Maldivian expertise (i.e., Schmidle, 2009). Though the organization itself is small, it counts a vast international network of scientists and policy expert contacts. Still, Bluepeace is one of the few institutional entities in a nation understood to lack a significant civil society presence (Kothari, 2014). Low in budget and without fixed headquarters, volunteers would meet in cafés and apartments throughout Malé, drawing on the private resources of their largely elite networks. In 2011, one of the NGO’s main projects was to implement the call to reconfigure Maldivian territory as a tool for attaining carbon neutrality, or to use the words of Bluepeace's stated objectives, combining “knowledge” with “awareness.” When I met Adil Hussein, the director, and his colleague Ismail Abad, they were designing the country’s first artificial mangrove ecosystem on Hulhumale Island. This public-private partnership between Bluepeace and the Malé Development Corporation also entailed 195 developing an adjacent public park. I joined them on one of their site visits. Hulhumale is an artificial residential island, dredged in 1997 with initial costs totaling $63 million and construction ongoing, to relieve overcrowding in Malé (Gardner, 2004). With just several thousand people living in a handful of neatly segmented housing developments, and many more unclaimed lots and construction projects underway, most of the two-squarekilometer island was failing to justify its expense. Bluepeace sought to put the underutilized island to work. For Hussein and Abad, helping to complete the state’s unfinished mandate by designing a neighborhood park while simultaneously playing a small part in reducing Maldivian carbon-dioxide emissions was a quintessentially democratic activity. The wetland mangrove ecosystem and park would be situated on a small plot at the end of a residential block near the beach, a miniscule terra nullius open to a crisis-driven politics of frontier ingenuity. The site was filled with overgrown vegetation and several hardy trees growing out of the crumbly white coral and sand dredged to construct Hulhumale. Hussein and Abad spent time debating ideas upon our arrival. Abad then photographed the site, while Hussein took me on a guided tour, stopping me at nearly every plant to explain something about it. He described a fig tree wrapping its branches around a palm, which would eventually kill it, as “mother nature in action.” The mangroves, he then explained, would offset emissions for an entire neighborhood. They would center a public space, featuring a pond inhabited by what he described as the keystone species of milkfish, eel, and tilapia, jogging paths, a teashop, and “places for romance.” After several years, “once this park is up and running, and is a biosphere, then the birds will come and populate . . . So all the people will get the chance to see the wildlife, mangroves and everything, plus birds,” Hussein explained, sketching the design (Fig. 3). For such an ambitious national carbon neutrality plan, mangroves were the perfect political plant. One of the world's best carbon sinks (Donato et al., 2011), they arrested the NGO’s attention as a solution to present and imminent environmental disaster. Co-founder Azam explained that mangrove forests offered a crucial line of coastal defense, working in tandem with coral reefs, beaches, and other coastal vegetation. Mangroves defended much of the Maldives from the 2004 tsunami, saving lives and maintaining human habitability throughout the country (Kinver, 2005). According to Hussein, some varieties can also be used as an emergency food source, “so [the mangrove] is Fig. 3. Hussein sketches out design ideas for Hulhumale’s mangrove ecosystem. 196 E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 important, with respect to food security.” Though more than one in six mangrove species are threatened (IUCN, 2010a), the rapid rejuvenation rate of the Bruguiera cylindrical and several other species native to the Maldives (IUCN, 2010b) offered concrete hope for the project’s reproducibility. Imagining a mangrove ecosystem on Hulhumale exemplified the co-production of science and ethics through self-consciously democratic practice: the knowledge-making to which the Bluepeace staff aspired, in seeking to stage the carbon-dioxide hungry mangrove as a reproducible form of retrofitting the environment, was meant to publicize one scientific solution to the climate crisis. They understood this as an amateur experiment to demonstrate the extent to which retrofitting islands with mangroves would bring the country closer to carbon neutrality. It was simultaneously an example, for the use of mangroves as carbon fixers by concerned citizens could be reproduced throughout the Maldives and much of the coastal world; the organization’s very aspiration to neutralize a neighborhood’s emissions was thus valuable for demonstrating the concrete contributions of concern. Furthermore, this experiment illustrated that the push for scientific ethics and ethically-driven science paid no mind to credentialed authority. It was a decidedly democratic kind of practice that recruited ordinary Maldivians into participatory citizenship for the political mission of climate change problem solving. “In order to be a case study on the frontline,” Hussein explained during his guided tour, “Maldives is important for the rest of the world. So the idea is to have a laboratory, an experimental place, where experiments can take place to save people in similar situations around the world.” Here, Hussein forwarded the president's hope that the Maldives do, and try, anything to reach carbon neutrality, whose example in turn promised widespread salvation. “So now,” he continued, “the experiment has to go global.” The Maldives will be “the world's laboratory . . . it’s going to be a laboratory, as well as a source of inspiration,” in stark contrast with slow-moving international institutions: They have these expensive summits, funded by taxpayers in the west, and at the same time they are making the people of the west feel guilty, and they are building more production in China and India and everywhere, [but] even the Africans are guilty, even Maldivians are guilty, everyone is guilty, in this problem, so . . . you have a blame game going on. We are just going to the west and seeking their support and their money. But no, nothing is [working] at the international level. So this is where the concept of our laboratory and experiment came. Because . . . if what we are saying, and if what the scientists are saying, is true, then why not have a place where we can have some strategies for experimentation?...That is where Maldives comes in. Transnational authorities on scientific consensus, Hussein argued, were no match for local experiments when it came to publicizing the need for emissions mitigation. Even if those organizations’ documents like the IPCC report suggested climate change’s urgency, they also “detached knowledge from meaning” (Jasanoff, 2010: 234). These Bluepeace actors saw their own actions as significantly more effective arguments for what their mission statement called “all those little things” that could, together, amount to large-scale solutions. Hussein went out of his way to remind me that he was not a credentialed expert: “I don't know the scientific names of any of these organisms,” he said, “because I am not a scientist.” Presenting knowledge of “scientific names” as a shibboleth to epistemic authority allowed Hussein to cast himself as an ordinary citizen who would use his NGO’s resources to set the stage for future studies and publicity. Enacting the entanglement of science and ethics as a form of explicitly non-expert democratic action, in other words, offered a civic complement to expertise: not being a scientist rendered Hussein’s scientific engagement uniquely political, while liberating it from strictures of method and consensus. Bluepeace actors thus flexibly combined epistemic with moral authority, framing the “laboratory” as a site for experiments in the name of an ethics of exemplarity. For Bluepeace, “the world's conscience” and “the world's laboratory” was one and the same. 4.4. Resilient citizens Hussein later strayed from the official Bluepeace agenda. Criticizing everyday concerns about development, and personally appalled by the idea of walled artificial islands as a last-resort solution (which the NGO officially endorsed), Hussein proposed that humans were never meant to stay in one place. Resilience, he suggested, should not mean the ability to stay on an island, but the ability to leave. “The IPCC projection,” he said, indicates “a one-meter rise. So, one meter rise means we'll still be here on this island [Hulhumale] . . . in hundred years’ time.” He predicted that the Maldives might soon consist of several artificial islands like Hulhumale, anticipating Vice President Deen’s proposal in 2012. Artificial islands and sea walls were temporary stopgaps that would fundamentally alter what it meant to be a Maldivian. “It will . . . diminish our economic potential. Fishing will be harder . . . we will become again more vulnerable. Our economy collapses, and . . . the tourism goes—” He then took an unexpected turn, explaining that his own position was “not mainstream.” “I believe that islands are temporary places,” Hussein told me, and our life should be more nomadic . . . Look, why don’t we live in two thousand islands, not on one island [Malé] but two thousand islands? You can go anywhere you want to be. You are a highly resilient person. You can move with your family anywhere. So what [we] need is [to] change our way of life. The way of our older people . . . back to those days. Hussein highlighted the absurdity of assuming that political units must be preserved in order for human life and ecosystems to endure. He imagined an idealized figure, the resilient human, who could sacrifice routines and settle new islands, just as his island ancestors had done. His image corroborates the critique that increasing transnational worry about “climate refugees” ignores a long history of mobility among island dwellers (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2011: 388). Bringing into stark relief the distinction between an elite urban Maldivian environmentalism and stereotypically non-elite concerns with development, Hussein sought to reverse the current trend of mass migration into Malé in the pursuit of “development.” He lamented: “Development is the destruction of our culture . . . they run from their old sustainable lifestyles.” Kasim Ruvaa, an architecture professor at the newly opened Maldives National University and member of the Bluepeace network, shared this view. I observed his class one evening. There, students presented home design projects that were meant to be environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral. They mapped their own futures as professionals with families onto their designs; some of these homes were designed like tents and dismantleable. Ruvaa encouraged his students to think unconventionally about what it will mean to live in the Maldives in the near and far futures, challenging the designs that would be fixed to a plot of land while growing excited about homes that could become mobile. Although Hussein and Ruvaa imagined a more mobile and resilient future, mobility was already an important part of adapting to ordinary scarcity for many Maldivians. Making a living often entailed moving among multiple island and ocean spaces for E. Hirsch / Global Environmental Change 35 (2015) 190–198 fishing, crop cultivation, and maintaining kin networks. Largely outside of Maldivian cities, the Nakaiy is a widely used traditional weather forecasting system that uses two-week calendar units to determine the optimal times for fishing and inter-island travel in the dry and monsoon seasons. This regulation of cyclical temporality for negotiating ocean travel suggests the centrality of inter-island movement to Maldivian life. In 2011, a Maldivian startup led by entrepreneur Shahee Ilyas sought to bring mobility’s ongoing relevance to market. Ilyas developed a smartphone application called Nakaiy Nevi which merged the “centuries old wisdom” of this “indigenous Maldivian calendar system” with weather data, so that, as their website’s pitch indicates, “at a time of shifting weather patterns on a global scale we can look and learn from the past to enable us to better prepare for the future” (Nakaiy, 2011). This application, in entrepreneurially updating a longstanding interest in adaptation for the software market, reflects the notion that private individuals know best how to deal with environmental rhythms. Thus, in Ilyas’ pitch, the national collective is only important as a source of an enduring indigenous culture that gives today's Maldivians the tools for remaining mobile and resilient individuals. These unconventional takes on resilience offer points of departure for rethinking what it means to belong to an island nation. Resilience here was not a fait accompli but an ethical disposition in the making that reframed “adaptive success” (Crate, 2011: 180) and the “ability to absorb or recover from exposure to stresses” (Lazrus, 2012: 286)—two definitions of resilience—as goals achievable at the level of a “person,” a “family,” or even a “people,” and which did not require the endurance of fixed settlements, states, or collectives. According to this perspective, the political unit, qua unit, was ethically inconsequential in the long term. Theorizing a post-state resilience, I suggest, was also itself a form of democratic engagement. It strengthened Hussein's position as an informed citizen-critic, just as it structured the professional education and political engagement of future Maldivian architects, and helped to configure the entrepreneurial spirit of a software developer embodying Nasheed’s ideal contributor “with a mad idea and an investment plan.” Here, departing from prevailing assumptions about states' permanence paradoxically enabled these Maldivians to enact their identity as democratic citizens by looking beyond a state horizon. 5. Conclusions Current scholarship urges us to complicate straightforward portrayals of climate crisis as a global phenomenon that simply touches down in the places it impacts. This piece has sought to trace the ways in which the Maldives was briefly engaged in translating a sense of vulnerability that came with inhabiting the geopolitical identity of the world's climate change synecdoche into a source of politically creative action. Examining that context, I have intended to discern what it means to reconfigure political cultures, cultivate knowledge, and transform ethics because of, and through, climate change. The study found that in explicit contrast to conventional ideas about the collective national victims of global crisis, a politics of vulnerability can also produce new forms of democratic practice, here driven by participation in a “world war effort” against carbon-dioxide emissions. That climate-based Maldivian democratic project, although fleeting, aimed to set new precedents in “normative innovation” (Eckersley 2007: 297), civic engagement, and articulation between geopolitical identity and national citizenship. The intertwinement of global crisis with a nation's changing political culture has a number of further implications for what it means to experience the consequences of climate crisis. It raises questions of scale, suggesting that notions of planetary life and 197 community life draw upon one another: the Maldivian project mobilized a theory of global unity in “war” against carbon-dioxide to preserve a small national community; at the same time, Maldivian actors like Bluepeace’s Hussein posited the importance of the hyper-local scale for “saving” the world. It also raises questions about temporality, putting the assumption that island dwellings and nation-states are meant to be permanent on the table for explicit debate. Finally, it makes clear that environmental vulnerability is not a universal or modular category, but varies widely, and can intersect with other forms of vulnerability and crisis. The way vulnerability is experienced is intimately intertwined with the political contexts in which it becomes legible. Epilogue. These implications have recently come into focus as a newly imprisoned Nasheed faces the consequences of his climate advocacy. What has defined Maldivian geopolitical identity since Nasheed’s 2012 resignation has been the perception of democracy’s failure, notably marked by the intimidation and arbitrary revote that derailed his 2013 attempt at reelection. In 2015, Nasheed was convicted on terrorism charges in what has widely been seen as a show trial (Amnesty International, 2015). His current imprisonment has stoked national mobilization and transnational advocacy; it is being fought by internationally recognized human rights lawyers, with British Prime Minister David Cameron publicly calling for Nasheed’s release. Though his fate is unsure, his fluctuation between two political identities—Champion of the Earth and Prisoner of Conscience—is indicative of the complex tensions that climate change raises through the contested issues of democratic engagement and development, sacrifice and survival, long-term visions and daily life. 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