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Paper short abstract:

This study analyzes the incorporation of ecotourism into climate change mitigation and adaptation in Kashmir, assessing if ecotourism initiatives align with environmental justice while addressing climate challenges.

Paper long abstract:

Tourism is promoted as a means of development in the conflict ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian State, where political instability and uncertainty is misrepresented through higher tourist numbers. And in order to tackle the public discontentment towards tourism driven ecological impact, the state has resorted to the deployment of ecotourism vocabulary. While ecotourism has become a talking point of state functionaries to show their consciousness of the climate crisis, this paper argues that the same consciousness does not reflect in climate change resilience strategies.

This study, hence, critically examines the integration of ecotourism within the broader frameworks of mitigation and adaptation transitions aimed at addressing climate change impacts in the region of Kashmir. It further explores whether the ecotourism initiatives that contribute to mitigating and adapting to the challenges posed by climate change are in consonance with environmental justice.

This research does this by scrutinizing the nuanced ways in which the supposed transitions co-produce environmental injustices that intersect with historical legacies of colonialism and current state dominance in the region. Drawing on frameworks such as environmental justice, the study investigates how the unequal impacts of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts may inadvertently perpetuate historical patterns of injustice, particularly in relation to marginalized communities.Through a critical lens, this research argues that tourism and the transition to ecotourism are essentially political tools deployed by the state within the larger 'development discourse' in the region to erode the question of ‘political sovereignty’.