ISRF—MPIWG Collaborative Fellowship Program

Projects 2023

• Nelson Chanza & Eric Kushinga Makombe: In Search of a Sustainable Development Trajectory for Postcolonial Zimbabwe

  This study engages with recent global environmental scholarly debates on the adaptation and mitigation options that a less-developed country such as Zimbabwe can best adopt to ensure long-term sustainability. Despite its small carbon footprint, Zimbabwe is disproportionately impacted by climate change, as evinced by the increasing frequency and severity of climatic risks. Cyclone Idai of 2019, which caused severe flooding in the country and its neighbors Mozambique and Malawi with a disastrous loss of lives, crops, livestock, and infrastructure, is a typical example of how Zimbabwe is experiencing the devastating effects of climate change. This makes our research agenda urgent and topical.

  The study analyzes rich primary and secondary data available from oral interviews with expert informants and ordinary people, contemporary reports, journal articles, and books, applying qualitative methods, comparison with other Southern African countries, case studies, and sustainable livelihood approaches. We argue that there is a dearth of knowledge on the nexus between sustainable development and climate change in Zimbabwe: approaches focusing on global or regional dimensions to these issues, while important, disguise other, more mundane and specific local environmental problems. Further, the impact of climate change on sustainable development should be differentiated and considered discretely. Our study will make a historically nuanced evaluation of the extent to which local livelihoods and the environment are impacted by considerations of political economy and proffer practicable solutions that are both cost-effective and sustainable in the medium to long term.

  Our approach combines earth and environmental science with political and economic considerations informing policy decisions on climate change over the four decades under study. We engage with the interdisciplinary debates between the natural sciences and the humanities and advance the theorization and empirical exploration of historical and scientific knowledge of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
  
  Nelson Chanza holds a PhD in Environmental Geography, MSc in Environmental Policy and Planning and BSc Honours in Biological Sciences. He has taught in universities in Zimbabwe and South Africa since 2007. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Johannesburg. Nelson also got several research awards, including the doctoral research bursary from Nelson Mandela University; DAAD climapAfrica fellowship; Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA-Wageningen) research grant; the Global Development Partnership Centre (GDPC-South Korea) fellowship; and recently the ISRF-MPIWG Collaborative Fellowship in Berlin. His research contributions largely involve multiple evidence paradigm and applications in climate science, i.e., local-based climate change indicators, and adaptation and mitigation strategies that are understood by and appropriate to local communities, including IKS. He has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters. His current research pursuits are in the areas of adaptation and resilience science. From a research front, he strives to make significant contribution in the discourse of sustainable human settlements through examining the interface between climate change and society. From a practice front, Nelson applies this knowledge to give expert-based support in the development and review of climate change policies, strategies and plans, and implementation of development projects in Africa.  He has been engaged by national and international organisations as an expert to support the implementation of climate resilient projects, including by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

  Eric Kushinga Makombe is a mid-career academic and lecturer in Economic History and Development. Eric is a Research Fellow in the History Department at the University of the Free State (South Africa) and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Heritage and Knowledge Systems at the University of Zimbabwe. Eric was a Visiting Professor at Lund University in Sweden for a couple of months in 2016. He holds a PhD (History) from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His broad research interests are in urban history, human economy and livelihoods, rural-urban linkages, climate change and rural development. Some of his published articles have appeared in the Journal of Developing Societies, Global Environment, Historia and Essays in Economic and Business History. Eric has also co-edited two book volumes as well as contributed book chapters to several manuscripts. Eric has received research grants and awards from CODESRIA, IFAS (French Institute of South Africa), the Land Deal Politics Initiative, DAAD NELGA Corona Research Fellowship, DAAD Climate Research for Alumni and Postdocs in Africa, and the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA research grant. Overall, Eric’s research agenda is informed by an intense commitment to socially useful scholarship contributing both to the empirical development of pragmatic and workable solutions to rural sustainability and economic livelihoods.

• Angelika Fortuna & Dewi Tan: The Discourse of Resilience in a Sinking Jakarta

  In the last decade, Northern Jakarta sank a staggering 2.5 meters, earning notoriety as the world’s most rapidly sinking city. Many researchers have projected that 90 percent of the coastal area will have subsided below sea level by 2030 or in another scenario by 2050. Anthropogenic factors such as rapid urbanization—with booming economic activity and expanding built-up areas—exacerbate the issue by accelerating subsidence at an unprecedented rate. Responding to this situation, discourses of resilience have arisen in policymaking and the public sphere. At the same time, the issue of subsidence has been approached as a flooding issue, which oversimplifies efforts to mitigate the sinking crisis.

  This research project begins by examining these resilience discourses from the perspectives of urban development and environmental anthropology, taking into account how key stakeholders—such as the government, building sector, media, and vulnerable communities—situate their resilience in the face of the alarming subsidence rate. We highlight how present-day flooding infrastructure to combat the city’s sinking correlates with Dutch technocratic interventions imposed during colonialism in Batavia (Jakarta). We trace the historical legacy of knowledge formation in resilience that is embedded within flood-management infrastructures, ranging from canalization to the fragmentation in Batavia’s water supply system implemented by colonial administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. By analyzing resilience discourses in flood-related approaches to subsidence through archival material, interviews, fieldwork, and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping, we call into question both sociohistorical and resilience efforts amid an invisible yet complex disaster in the making.

  Angelika Fortuna is a Program Officer at International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID). She currently works with international development agencies such as the Ford Foundation, USAID, GIZ and others to support developmental projects in Indonesia. She obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Urban Planning from Tarumanagara University in Jakarta and a Master’s Degree in Socio-spatial Planning from the University of Groningen. She is also part of the SEED group at Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr), University of Melbourne.
  She does research and program management by combining Qualitative Methodology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to foster knowledge in urban resilience, its socio-environmental entanglements and historical processes featuring case studies in Jakarta and beyond. With MPIWG, her current research examines the discourse of resilience within the issue of severe land subsidence in North Jakarta. It traces the historical knowledge formation in infrastructural resilience by analyzing the Dutch flooding approach in Batavia (colonial city of Jakarta) developed in the 18th-19th century. This research then calls to both socio-historical and resilience perspectives against the sinking, whilst questioning the efficacy of Western centric paradigm towards disaster resilience and its manifestation in both colonial and postcolonial context of Jakarta as one of the world’s fastest-sinking coastal cities.

  Dewi Tan studied Anthropology and Environmental Science at the Yale School of Environment, obtaining her MESc in 2019 with a focus on urban inequality, modernity, speculative urbanism, and water-related disasters in Indonesia. Her current research focuses on examining the discourses of the sinking crisis in Jakarta, and the urban politics behind various  socio-historical and infrastructure approaches of resilience. Dewi currently works at the Ambasz Institute at MoMA overseeing the research and public programs dedicated to advancing the relationship between the built and natural environment, and at YABB, the GoTo Group Impact Foundation to develop their sustainability and climate resilience programs. As a filmmaker, she is interested in complementing academic research with visual media in hopes of engaging with a wider audience through “multilingual” dialogue across various interrelated mediums. Her recent short film on Bantar Gebang, the largest landfill in Southeast Asia screened at DOC NYC and Jakarta Film Week in 2022. She is currently developing her first narrative feature with themes related to modernity, shopping malls, and urban development.

• Leonardo Niro & Bruno Rates: From the Forces of Life to the Energies of Mind

  This project develops a transnational theoretical and comparative approach to the history of science, exploring how different scientists in the late eighteenth to early twentieth century in (and straddling) the life sciences and psychological sciences engaged with notions of force and energy as a way of conceptualizing vital and mental phenomena. Inspired by the success of Newtonian mechanics, eighteenth-century life scientists made extensive use of various concepts of force to apprehend vital phenomena. When applied in practice, however, the concepts underwent important changes. The discovery of the law of conservation of energy in the 1840s and the subsequent development of thermodynamics in the late nineteenth century further transformed these terms and affected the ways in which other sciences would come to assimilate them. With the establishment of scientific psychology in the eighteenth to nineteenth century, and particularly towards the close of the nineteenth century, we observe a similar movement regarding psychic phenomena.

  The assimilation of these concepts was by no means univocal. It contained one central antagonism: some researchers used energetic concepts to bring their field of studies into the realm of the natural sciences by attempting to reduce their objects of investigation to quantitative relations, but others used them to oppose precisely such mechanical reduction by formulating a specific form of energy. This project explores the role played by concepts of force and energy in framing the objects of study of the life sciences and psychological sciences, against the backdrop of continuities and ruptures in the constitution of biology and psychology as autonomous disciplines.

  Leonardo Niro studied Psychology in Brazil and the UK, obtaining his PhD at University College London in 2018 with a dissertation on the history of Sigmund Freud’s early engagement with physiology. He is a Lecturer at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (UK), where he runs the Research Group in the History of Psychoanalysis. At the MPIWG, he is doing a Collaborative Fellowship in the History of Knowledge (co-funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation), in collaboration with Dr. Bruno Rates. The joint project explores the role played by concepts of force and energy in framing the objects of study of psychology and physiology in the 18th to the 20th century.

  Bruno Rates is a post-doc researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of São Paulo-USP/FAPESP, Brazil. He was a visitor scholar at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2017-2018) and at the École Normale Supérieure/ENS-Paris (2023-2024). He published articles in Portuguese, English and French about the philosophical impacts of the life sciences from 1850-1939. His book, The Expressions of Life. Nature and Culture in the Philosophy of Bergson, is to be released in 2023. At the MPIWG, he is doing a Collaborative Fellowship in the History of Knowledge (co-funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation-ISRF), in collaboration with Dr. Leonardo Niro. The joint project explores the role played by concepts of force and energy in framing the objects of study of psychology and biology in the 18th to the 20th century.