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 zones from increasingly devastating climate hazards. Using the LTEP as a case study, we ask: what and who drives and sustains hard infrastructure as climate adaptation, and through what processes? To analyse this question, we conducted 45 in-depth interviews with project proponents, government officials, academics, practitioners and community members, as well as reviewed relevant documents to unravel the relations of power and politics that position the project as an effective and popular adaptation strategy. Through the lenses of urban political ecology and infrastructure studies, we argue that the LTEP derives its allure from the infrastructural politics of (in)visibility: the strategic deployment of hard infrastructures as visual tools to advance political agendas. These politics selectively highlight elements that symbolise protection and progress while obscuring aspects that fail to meet technical and aesthetic standards. The infrastructural politics of (in)visibility are shaped by multi-scalar power dynamics linking global and local interests that are propelled by a constellation of actors with diverse agendas and become active sites of negotiation and contestation where communities can organise and voice dissent.