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Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that caste inequalities reinforced through various market interventions and integrations make the Dalits–the victims of climate change in India. It illuminates how marginalised communities in the global south experience and respond to the consequences of climate change .

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the socio-ecological processes in two regions of rural India. It maps the distinct and uneven trajectories of politics of land where differences in power relations and access to resources imply differences in vulnerability to climate change. In other words, It illuminates how people in the global south at the margins of caste relations experience and respond to exacerbated consequences of climate change in the capitalist development process. The paper unfolds these dynamics at the microlevel drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two ecologically sensitive regions of India’s Eastern and Southern parts. One case focuses on the market interventions in the coal mining region located in Odisha, and the other focuses on the market integration in the ecologically sensitive areas of the Western Ghats of Kerala. The paper argues that the unequal power relations through control of resources are (re)produced in climate change discourses in complex ways. In both cases, landless Dalit communities located in both region's specific historical processes of capitalism are at the margins of climate change. The paper points out that caste-based structural inequalities reinforced through various market interventions and integrations make the marginalised Dalits – the victims of climate change. The paper concludes by calling for addressing the caste inequalities and access to resources shaping the complex realities of climate change through decentralised political interventions at the local level moving beyond mere technocratic approaches to climate change.