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Sarah Sharma: Relationally Comparing the Global North and Global South: Examining Climate Resilience Across and Within Amsterdam and Dhaka

This book project is designed to examine how climate resilience policies unfold within and across two distinct cities: Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Dhaka, Bangladesh. In so doing, I build a relationally comparative framework to understand the International Political Economy and Environment (IPEE) of climate resilience in global capitalism to analyse how this policy framework unfolds in an interdependent, yet unique manner in each case. There is an outstanding need to further provincialize research on global South to rebalance IPE in a manner that reflects the hybridization, localization, and transformation of global governance in different contexts. I argue that contrasting Dhaka against Amsterdam relationally allows for contributions to knowledge on neoliberalization and climate change in the global South while understanding that these processes cannot be divorced from historical and regulatory processes in the global North. Further, I argue that Dhaka’s experience with climate resilience should not be presented against Amsterdam’s to “add in” analysis on urban governance from the global South. To do so maintains the normalcy of experiences in the global North and subjugates urban experiences in the global South in the realm of global development, rather than international politics. As such, my book project places examinations of climate resilience in Amsterdam and Dhaka in conversation with one another and considers these cases as sites that reflect historical and contemporary structural processes in the broader global political economy while being simultaneously shaped by contextually relevant governance institutions and relations of power.