Towards a Sociology of Incumbency in the Face of Climate Change

In the face of increasingly intense climate-related disasters, many social actors are working strenuously to keep things the same, to keep things in place. They want to insist that certain things should not and do not have to change in the face of the climate crisis. In this presentation of work-in-progress, Rebecca Elliott probes this conviction through what she tentatively calls a sociology of “incumbency.” Incumbency captures an often-implicit commitment to preserving present arrangements of people and property, and the familiar land uses, skylines, nebulous character of place, routines of life, and identities those arrangements generate. Incumbency expresses the resonance of an unremarked understanding that who is there now has something like a right to stay, and that what is physically in place now is worthy of protection. Elliott developed an analytical framework for discerning the historical, political economic, and affective dimensions of incumbency on the basis of a census of climate change adaptation infrastructure projects in the coastal United States, as well as a detailed case study of a planned seawall in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. This climate change adaptation infrastructure both makes and expresses incumbency’s possibility.

Rebecca Elliott is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where she is also affiliated with the Phelan US Centre, the Grantham Institute for Research on Climate Change and the Environment, and the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Her research examines the intersections of environmental change and economic life, as they appear across public policy, administrative institutions, and everyday practice. She is author of Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2021). In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has contributed to The New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, and Harper's Magazine. She is an editor of the British Journal of Sociology.