Sabra Webber
Biographic Data
| ID | 143531 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sabra Webber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sabra |
| FAMILY NAME | Webber |
| SIGNATURE | WEBBER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7597-4622 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Repositioning climate finance
It is a pleasure to engage with generous and insightful colleagues about our book, Climate Finance. Here, we respond to their commentaries in light of compounding violent, ecological and political-economic crises that have only intensified since we wrote the book. We address three main challenges: the increasingly contested politics of climate investment, the entanglement of competitive geopolitics and economic nationalism with climate policies a…
Urban pulse: Land reclamation as climate urbanism
Large coastal city regions have rapidly accelerated their outward expansion, reclaiming thousands of square kilometers of land from the sea. Here, we argue that land reclamation is emblematic of the emerging logics of climate urbanism; a spectacular and speculative form of urban adaptation, multiplying in vulnerable cities around the world. We present illustrative cases from San Francisco, Jakarta, and Funafuti to suggest that contemporary land r…
At the edges of the global philanthropic complex
In response to Fuentenebro and colleagues’ paper about the geographies of super-philanthropy, this commentary examines the edges and potential cracks of the global philanthropic complex. By briefly bringing the global philanthropic complex to everyday academic and activist life, I focus on its ambivalent and sometimes contradictory inclusions and relations. Using these illustrative cases, I suggest the need to consider when the philanthropic comp…
The Urban Metabolism of Flood Protection Infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia
Investments in large‐scale climate infrastructures are central to emerging forms of climate urbanism. In Jakarta, flood protection infrastructures seek to protect the city from devastating flood events in anticipation of future catastrophes. In this article we chart the material and labour politics of this transformation of the climate infrastructure of Jakarta and its peri‐urban hinterlands. To do this, we develop the urban metabolic imperative …
Acts of energy citizenship in community solar gardens
Characterised as sites of energy citizenship, community energy projects help people locked out of the corporate green energy and rooftop solar markets to participate in the renewable energy transition. However, the environmental politics of community energy projects cannot be assumed. Drawing from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with community energy organisers, advocates and participants, we compare two projects in New South Wal…
Building resilience or reinforcing vulnerability? The enduring allure of hard infrastructure as adaptation
This paper examines a climate buffer infrastructural paradox: that, despite an expansive archive documenting the limits of hard structural solutions, they retain their allure as a popular technical solution to protect against climatic hazards. The Leyte Tide Embankment Project (LTEP) in the Philippines, also known as "The Great Wall of Leyte", is one of dozens of climate buffer megaprojects proliferating globally that promise to protect coastal z…
For and against climate capitalism
This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises…
Reimagining climate change research and policy from the Australian adaptation impasse
Tracking, calculating, watching: Governing and delay in the Jakarta Smart City
Jakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Sm…
Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair, and Decommodification
Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We …
Transitioning to renewable energy in Sydney: Relational and co‐evolving energy geographies
This article analyses the geographies and politico‐economic dynamics of Sydney’s multiscalar renewable energy transition. Sydney’s energy economy seems to be dominated by marketisation, privatisation, and fossil fuel‐generated electricity, yet simultaneously a decentralised renewable energy transformation is unfolding. In this context, we ask how do politico‐economic and technical changes co‐evolve within the renewable energy transition? What ten…
Climate services promise better decisions but mainly focus on better data
Creative farmers and climate service politics in Indonesian rice production
Providing climate information services to farmers is expected to optimise agricultural outputs amidst increasing climate uncertainty. Consequently, Indonesian governmental and extra-governmental actors provide climate services with the goal of improving productivity and increasing national food security. Existing research about climate-smart agriculture generally, and climate services in particular, presents these projects as largely technical or…
Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank's Resilient City
According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks …
Wheeling Out Urban Resilience: Philanthrocapitalism, Marketization, and Local Practice
In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in concert with the World Bank. The complex is…
A rusting gold standard: Failures in an Indonesian RCT, and the implications for poverty reduction
Randomised Control Trials (RCT) are both widely used in development, reaching hundreds of millions through RCT informed policy, and highly regarded, receiving a Nobel Prize in Economics. Proponents, largely academic economists, position RCTs as a scientific and ideologically neutral way to get to the heart of 'what works' in development. However, this new and radical micro-experimental approach to poverty reduction has sat uneasily within the bro…
Everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance in North Jakarta's kampungs
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in…
Globalizing urban resilience
Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and gove…
The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development
Development economics and institutions have a new gold standard: the randomized control trial (RCT). An RCT is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in order to measure the impact of a development project. Due to randomization—randomly distributing people or communities to receive either control or treatment—advocates suggest that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention, and attribute a causal relationship be…
Circulating climate services: Commercializing science for climate change adaptation in Pacific Islands
Measuring and tracking the flow of climate change adaptation aid to the developing world
The developed world has pledged to mobilize at least US $100 billion per year of ‘new’ and ‘additional’ funds by 2020 to help the developing world respond to climate change. Tracking this finance is particularly problematic for climate change adaptation, as there is no clear definition of what separates adaptation aid from standard development aid. Here we use a historical database of overseas development assistance projects to test the effect of…
Climate service warnings: Cautions about commercializing climate science for adaptation in the developing world
This article examines the increasing emphasis amongst climate scientists and development professionals on providing ‘climate services’ in order to inform adaptation decisions in vulnerable countries. The climate service business model hopes to provide ‘on demand’ and ‘actionable’ information products that are useful for policy makers. Drawing from literature across the natural and social sciences, we outline potential benefits and limits of this …
Climate Change Adaptation as a Growing Development Priority: Towards Critical Adaptation Scholarship
Climate change adaptation has grown rapidly in prominence in development practice and scholarship. Alongside this growth, adaptation has been folded into the world of development. This article reviews the ways that adaptation has become a concern for the world of development, suggesting three important trends: problematizations of vulnerability, the financial architecture of adaptation, and the tool of climate change 'mainstreaming'. Given that a…
Randomising Development: Geography, Economics and the Search for Scientific Rigour
Development economics has become something of an innovator within the discipline of economics, due to its adoption of experimental and statistical analysis techniques. In this paper I give examples of this new trend in development economics: randomised‐control trials, natural experiments, specialist analytical techniques like pre‐analysis plans, and evidence‐driven policy evaluation. I explore this novel experimental development economics in conv…
Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation
This article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analy…
Globalizing urban resilience
Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and gove…
Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank's Resilient City
According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks …
Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair, and Decommodification
Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We …
Wheeling Out Urban Resilience: Philanthrocapitalism, Marketization, and Local Practice
In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in concert with the World Bank. The complex is…
Climate Change Adaptation as a Growing Development Priority: Towards Critical Adaptation Scholarship
Climate change adaptation has grown rapidly in prominence in development practice and scholarship. Alongside this growth, adaptation has been folded into the world of development. This article reviews the ways that adaptation has become a concern for the world of development, suggesting three important trends: problematizations of vulnerability, the financial architecture of adaptation, and the tool of climate change 'mainstreaming'. Given that a…
Circulating climate services: Commercializing science for climate change adaptation in Pacific Islands
Performative Vulnerability: Climate Change Adaptation Policies and Financing in Kiribati
This paper explores some of the perverse effects of climate change adaptation policies and financing in the Republic of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Central Pacific. I examine how encounters between financiers and government officials might produce vulnerability to climate change. I draw throughout from field research conducted in Kiribati, an archetypical 'vulnerable-to-climate-change' place, and a preeminent site for experimentati…
Everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance in North Jakarta's kampungs
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in…
The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development
Development economics and institutions have a new gold standard: the randomized control trial (RCT). An RCT is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in order to measure the impact of a development project. Due to randomization—randomly distributing people or communities to receive either control or treatment—advocates suggest that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention, and attribute a causal relationship be…
Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation
This article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analy…
Climate service warnings: Cautions about commercializing climate science for adaptation in the developing world
This article examines the increasing emphasis amongst climate scientists and development professionals on providing ‘climate services’ in order to inform adaptation decisions in vulnerable countries. The climate service business model hopes to provide ‘on demand’ and ‘actionable’ information products that are useful for policy makers. Drawing from literature across the natural and social sciences, we outline potential benefits and limits of this …
Obstacles to climate change adaptation decisions: A case study of sea-level rise and coastal protection measures in Kiribati
Tracking, calculating, watching: Governing and delay in the Jakarta Smart City
Jakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Sm…
Transitioning to renewable energy in Sydney: Relational and co‐evolving energy geographies
This article analyses the geographies and politico‐economic dynamics of Sydney’s multiscalar renewable energy transition. Sydney’s energy economy seems to be dominated by marketisation, privatisation, and fossil fuel‐generated electricity, yet simultaneously a decentralised renewable energy transformation is unfolding. In this context, we ask how do politico‐economic and technical changes co‐evolve within the renewable energy transition? What ten…
Randomising Development: Geography, Economics and the Search for Scientific Rigour
Development economics has become something of an innovator within the discipline of economics, due to its adoption of experimental and statistical analysis techniques. In this paper I give examples of this new trend in development economics: randomised‐control trials, natural experiments, specialist analytical techniques like pre‐analysis plans, and evidence‐driven policy evaluation. I explore this novel experimental development economics in conv…
For and against climate capitalism
This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises…
Reimagining climate change research and policy from the Australian adaptation impasse
Creative farmers and climate service politics in Indonesian rice production
Providing climate information services to farmers is expected to optimise agricultural outputs amidst increasing climate uncertainty. Consequently, Indonesian governmental and extra-governmental actors provide climate services with the goal of improving productivity and increasing national food security. Existing research about climate-smart agriculture generally, and climate services in particular, presents these projects as largely technical or…
Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master
Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master. Frances Trix. Conduct and Communication Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.189 pp
At the edges of the global philanthropic complex
In response to Fuentenebro and colleagues’ paper about the geographies of super-philanthropy, this commentary examines the edges and potential cracks of the global philanthropic complex. By briefly bringing the global philanthropic complex to everyday academic and activist life, I focus on its ambivalent and sometimes contradictory inclusions and relations. Using these illustrative cases, I suggest the need to consider when the philanthropic comp…
The House of Si Abd Allah: The Oral History of a Moroccan Family
Arab Women in the Field: Studying Your Own Society. Soraya Altorki and Camillia Fawzi EL‐Solh, eds. Modern Arab Studies. Tareq Y. Ismael, series ed
Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master
Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master. Frances Trix. Conduct and Communication Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.189 pp
Performative Vulnerability: Climate Change Adaptation Policies and Financing in Kiribati
This paper explores some of the perverse effects of climate change adaptation policies and financing in the Republic of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Central Pacific. I examine how encounters between financiers and government officials might produce vulnerability to climate change. I draw throughout from field research conducted in Kiribati, an archetypical 'vulnerable-to-climate-change' place, and a preeminent site for experimentati…
Obstacles to climate change adaptation decisions: A case study of sea-level rise and coastal protection measures in Kiribati
Randomising Development: Geography, Economics and the Search for Scientific Rigour
Development economics has become something of an innovator within the discipline of economics, due to its adoption of experimental and statistical analysis techniques. In this paper I give examples of this new trend in development economics: randomised‐control trials, natural experiments, specialist analytical techniques like pre‐analysis plans, and evidence‐driven policy evaluation. I explore this novel experimental development economics in conv…
Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation
This article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analy…
Measuring and tracking the flow of climate change adaptation aid to the developing world
The developed world has pledged to mobilize at least US $100 billion per year of ‘new’ and ‘additional’ funds by 2020 to help the developing world respond to climate change. Tracking this finance is particularly problematic for climate change adaptation, as there is no clear definition of what separates adaptation aid from standard development aid. Here we use a historical database of overseas development assistance projects to test the effect of…
Climate service warnings: Cautions about commercializing climate science for adaptation in the developing world
This article examines the increasing emphasis amongst climate scientists and development professionals on providing ‘climate services’ in order to inform adaptation decisions in vulnerable countries. The climate service business model hopes to provide ‘on demand’ and ‘actionable’ information products that are useful for policy makers. Drawing from literature across the natural and social sciences, we outline potential benefits and limits of this …
Climate Change Adaptation as a Growing Development Priority: Towards Critical Adaptation Scholarship
Climate change adaptation has grown rapidly in prominence in development practice and scholarship. Alongside this growth, adaptation has been folded into the world of development. This article reviews the ways that adaptation has become a concern for the world of development, suggesting three important trends: problematizations of vulnerability, the financial architecture of adaptation, and the tool of climate change 'mainstreaming'. Given that a…
Circulating climate services: Commercializing science for climate change adaptation in Pacific Islands
Globalizing urban resilience
Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban resilience such that private sector involvement becomes integral to urban development planning and gove…
The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development
Development economics and institutions have a new gold standard: the randomized control trial (RCT). An RCT is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in order to measure the impact of a development project. Due to randomization—randomly distributing people or communities to receive either control or treatment—advocates suggest that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention, and attribute a causal relationship be…
Everyday resilience, reworking, and resistance in North Jakarta's kampungs
In the kampungs of North Jakarta, people make their lives in the face of a variety of transformations. While Jakarta has always experienced flooding from the coast and from its rivers, flooding is getting worse, and has dramatic effects on kampungs and their residents. At the same time, flood mitigation efforts by the government of Jakarta involve new infrastructures, such as sea walls and land reclamation, which interrupt livelihood practices in…
Climate services promise better decisions but mainly focus on better data
Creative farmers and climate service politics in Indonesian rice production
Providing climate information services to farmers is expected to optimise agricultural outputs amidst increasing climate uncertainty. Consequently, Indonesian governmental and extra-governmental actors provide climate services with the goal of improving productivity and increasing national food security. Existing research about climate-smart agriculture generally, and climate services in particular, presents these projects as largely technical or…
Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank's Resilient City
According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks …
Wheeling Out Urban Resilience: Philanthrocapitalism, Marketization, and Local Practice
In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in concert with the World Bank. The complex is…
A rusting gold standard: Failures in an Indonesian RCT, and the implications for poverty reduction
Randomised Control Trials (RCT) are both widely used in development, reaching hundreds of millions through RCT informed policy, and highly regarded, receiving a Nobel Prize in Economics. Proponents, largely academic economists, position RCTs as a scientific and ideologically neutral way to get to the heart of 'what works' in development. However, this new and radical micro-experimental approach to poverty reduction has sat uneasily within the bro…
Financing Reparative Climate Infrastructures: Capital Switching, Repair, and Decommodification
Despite geographical critiques of the financialisation of climate governance, the realities of deteriorating environmental conditions, entrenched market logics, and the concentration of capital in the hands of financiers demand new strategies to contend with climate finance. We envision routes to better futures by surveying “financialised” responses to climate catastrophe that might be harnessed towards more reparative and decommodified ends. We …
Transitioning to renewable energy in Sydney: Relational and co‐evolving energy geographies
This article analyses the geographies and politico‐economic dynamics of Sydney’s multiscalar renewable energy transition. Sydney’s energy economy seems to be dominated by marketisation, privatisation, and fossil fuel‐generated electricity, yet simultaneously a decentralised renewable energy transformation is unfolding. In this context, we ask how do politico‐economic and technical changes co‐evolve within the renewable energy transition? What ten…
Reimagining climate change research and policy from the Australian adaptation impasse
Tracking, calculating, watching: Governing and delay in the Jakarta Smart City
Jakarta is widely lauded by global consultancies, technology giants and critical scholars as an increasingly important ‘smart’ city. One of the reasons for this is the attempted use by state, corporate and individual actors of smart technologies, discourses and practices to solve the urban challenges of flooding, traffic and waste management in the context of climate change and urbanisation. In this paper, we examine the efforts of the Jakarta Sm…
For and against climate capitalism
This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises…
At the edges of the global philanthropic complex
In response to Fuentenebro and colleagues’ paper about the geographies of super-philanthropy, this commentary examines the edges and potential cracks of the global philanthropic complex. By briefly bringing the global philanthropic complex to everyday academic and activist life, I focus on its ambivalent and sometimes contradictory inclusions and relations. Using these illustrative cases, I suggest the need to consider when the philanthropic comp…
Economics (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Climate change (15 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Ecology (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration (8 works)