Ambivalent Risk Reduction: SADR’s Techniques in Authority and Climate Action

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Abstract

This paper examines how the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) has mobilized climate action as a strategy for sovereignty-building amid protracted displacement in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. Focusing on recurrent environmental hazards (e.g., catastrophic flooding, water scarcity, rising temperatures, and food insecurity), I argue that SADR’s approach to disaster risk reduction reflects a strategic ambivalence. In its governance of the camps, SADR pursues forms of hazard mitigation that maintain its authority while crucially preserving a provisional temporality. Investments in short-term water management plans, small-scale agricultural initiatives, and the distribution of tents address immediate vulnerabilities without concretizing Sahrawi displacement (materially and temporally) through more permanent urban infrastructures. Likewise, SADR regulates Sahrawi (im)mobility by making political calculations—both encouraging and restricting mobility—to protect the production of Sahrawi identity and affirm control over people, territory, and Sahrawi cultural narratives. Narrative control is also important for SADR outside of the camps, where it engages global climate processes to advance claims for political legitimacy. As one example, SADR’s publishing of an “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” per the Paris Agreement represents an attempt to prefigure Sahrawi nationhood within an international climate regime that does not formally recognize its legitimacy. However, SADR’s engagement with these global climate processes is marked by a broader ambivalence to actual climate targets as evidenced by its limited progress under other risk reduction mechanisms. Thus, by examining SADR’s approaches to climate action both within the camps and within the international arena, this paper contributes to broader debates on the relationship between environmental politics and protracted displacement and the structural inequalities within the international regimes that govern them.

Author

• Ethan Mayer-Rich, CUNY-Graduate Center