Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation by Sarah E. Vaughn

Abstract

Engineering Vulnerability, written by sociocultural anthropologist Sarah E. Vaughn, is a fascinating book that will be of interest to multiple fields of research across environmental politics. Vaughn’s fieldwork and archival research into water management and climate adaptation in Guyana draw a long and complex history of a low-lying coastal settlement. Nothing about this history is simple, but she manages it all deftly, telling a story that historicizes the disastrous flooding of 2005; the colonial water management first of the Dutch, then of the British; and the changing demographics of a state whose independence has not ended either racial strife or settlement, with only 10.5 percent of the officially recorded population identifying as Indigenous Amerindian. Vaughn draws widely on theory, using a critical ethnographic approach to give detail and specificity to a story of climate vulnerability. This approach allows her to expand notions of climate adaptation, vulnerability, and the relationship of race to both. Engineering Vulnerability will therefore be of interest to environmental researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds, all of whom will take something from this intriguing book. The Guyana context is of great interest in and of itself. A member of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), Guyana is counted officially as a “small island developing state,” despite not being an island. It is also a multiracial settler society, with its own politics of race that, Vaughn is careful to explain, does not center around Whiteness. Vaughn discusses racial politics in the book, but it is not for the most part a book about coloniality or racial capitalism. Instead, Vaughn asks us to consider racial politics in global contexts of post-emancipation, where settlers are nonWhite. The majority of the population are Indoor Afro-Guyanese, brought to Guyana as enslaved or indentured laborers, now trying to make lives on water logged terrain made habitable only through colonial intervention, the forced labor of their ancestors, and the knowledge of Indigenous people. Vaughn’s understanding of vulnerability is hinted at in the book’s title but is more closely reflected in the title of the book’s introduction: “Where Would I Go? There Was No Place with No Water.”What Vaughn draws out so well is that climate adaptation has a politics of where: where is home, where is a valid settlement, where will adaptation be done, where will be deemed worthy of