XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

456

Missing the Sociopolitical Links: Food, Energy, and Water Security in Cities

RC24 Environment and Society (host committee)

Language: Spanish and English

Urbanization and climate change, two major human forces unleashed by the industrial age are on a course that poses both unprecedented risks to food, energy and water (FEW) security, and compelling opportunities. Cities are security hotspots and crucibles of innovations to enhance populations’ security.
Scholarship has underscored that FEW systems are so interconnected that actions in one frequently have impacts on the others. Thus, in order to reduce tradeoffs and enhance synergies, proponents of a nexus framing of FEW-security encourage integrative approaches to analysis, planning and decision-making. An emphasis on these integrative approaches has moved development and research communities to pursue an array of frameworks to uncover the analytical and normative dimensions of FEW-security.
Urban decision makers are grappling every day with the operational challenge of providing their populations with FEW, and protecting FEW availability and access against floods, droughts and other climate-hazards. Therefore, innovative science and policy actions are needed to help them match their sustainability and resilience goals with reality, and that see this challenge as a sociopolitical and ethical one, and not only a technical one. This session invites presentations that engage with the following questions: how have social sciences engaged with the conceptualization of urban FEW-security, and what does it mean to have a city that is “FEW-secure”? Are methodologies adopted to measuring FEW-security a concern? How are political and ethical questions of equity, which any attempt to create FEW-security unavoidably raises, to be achieved? What are the sociopolitical challenges of achieving knowledge and policy integration?