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Paper short abstract:

The paper challenges critiques of climate-resilient development as a necessarily reactionary techno-managerial exercise. It adopts a generative approach to engage with a grassroots network in India as a site where resilient policies for rainfed regions are reimagined beyond a paradigm of irrigation.

Paper long abstract:

In the rainfed drylands of India, climate-resilient policies are often reduced to a package of practices to tackle water scarcity by increasing irrigation and transition towards commercial agriculture. While the reactionary character of these policy techno-fixes has been widely discussed, this paper takes a generative approach to reimagine what more equitable and plural resilient socioecologies could look like when approached from a different standpoint.

Advancing a socionatural interpretation of resilience as a practice enacted within different more-than-human assemblages, the paper reframes resilience as a process that is done through everyday makings, rather than the property of a socio-ecological system. Suggesting that multiple articulations of resilience exist as equally valid and real, I bring this frame to bear upon ethnographic research with an Indian-based grassroots Network that works reimagine rainfed regions beyond the current paradigm of irrigation. Exploring the tools the Network mobilizes to inflect change in the policy realm, this account illuminates their strategy to infuse within instituted metrics and indicators alternative parameters that make visible those practices, relations and values discarded by a metrology of resilience as irrigation.

The paper suggests that rethinking plural resilience policies requires reframing investigations from the standpoint of socio-ecological movements and their practices of mobilization. While not necessarily talking the language of resilience nor that of climate change, they situate their vision of a resilient rural life within a deeper understanding of a regions’ agrarian economy and ecology, collectively indicating ways to expand and deepen what effective climate action could look like.