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Paper short abstract

This research looks at how decentralized drinking water technologies come into being tracing them from inception to production, and their use affects communities in the long run.

Paper long abstract

Worldwide water insecurities are outcomes of governance processes (Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2023), where decision making ranges from a combination of stakeholders and intentions with complex relationships between the “formal” and “informal”. This research looks at how decentralized drinking water technologies come into being tracing them from inception to production, and their use in the long run. Through a case study in climate-change affected region in southwestern coastal Bangladesh, it shows the proliferation of decentralized technologies for drinking water which have created a system of discrimination for the users, especially women. Beginning with problematic notions of “crisis”, it shows marginalization, narrowing down of options, and ironically more drinking water insecurity were reported by local women who live in precarious conditions. This research analyses the history, rules, and policies of the decentralized water infrastructure delivery approaches and delves into their consequences for women’s lives. Initial results reveal mismatch of intentions both within and beyond the formal and informal sector, doubling of projects and creation of path dependencies for poor communities. It aims to guide our understanding of the more complex workings of imagination, production and experience of and with infrastructure and has relevance for transitions occurring in water scarce regions of the Global South and can also be applied to other areas across the global South and North alike.

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Paper short abstract

For indigenous communities, ‘wellbeing’ emerges through relationships, including with the environment. While the planetary health paradigm embraces these values, it often depoliticizes them. This paper critiques such tendencies revealing planetary well-being as a deeply contested political site.

Paper long abstract

Marking an epistemic shift, relational-wellbeing views ‘wellbeing’ as shaped by relationships individuals share and not as a property they possess. Rethinking wellbeing in the context of indigenous communities and communities affected by climate change shows these relationships include the environment. The capitalist destruction of indigenous knowledge and ecological relationships has disproportionately impacted indigenous lives, leading to indigenous critiques of capitalist extractivism and neoliberal development. These critiques resonate strongly with the paradigm of planetary health, introduced in 2015, in response to the global climate crisis. It nudged global development initiatives to be attentive to indigenous knowledge and life experiences as an alternative path for managing and mitigating the crisis..

However, these alternatives often romanticise or de-politicise indigenous ontologies, reinforcing neoliberal logics by rendering indigenous demands into 'sustainable development' principles. Such perspectives portray indigenous peoples as less ‘indigenous’ or render them as contradicted political subjects negotiating and/or complying with institutions that oppress them, if they do not showcase resilience or sustainability. This paper responds to such essentialised extractivist and epistemically unjust representations of indigeneity through an emic approach, drawing upon ethnographic vignettes from Jharkhand, India. It argues that thinking with indigenous peoples means considering all aspects of relationality—dominant and subversive—that underpin their lives. It entails situating the contradictory fields of relations—social, personal, ecological—through the historical trajectories of structural violence constituting them. Demands for (planetary) wellbeing, then, instead of being given, are revealed as deeply contested sites of making and unmaking—of selves, communities, and ecologies.

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Climate change is severely impacting Indigenous youth in Amazonia. Through a literature review of climate policies and empirical studies, we reflect on Indigenous 'climate vulnerability' through a decolonial lens and advocate for policies that promote just planetary health with/for Indigenous youth.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches climate change as a crisis that profoundly affects both the territory and well-being of Indigenous peoples, emphasising its intergenerational dimensions. It is based on a preliminary literature review conducted for a pilot project in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazonia, drawing on analyses of climate and disaster policies in both countries, media coverage of extreme weather events, and empirical studies on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous children and adolescents. Adopting a decolonial perspective, we examine how territory and health are deeply interconnected for Indigenous Amazonian peoples, and how climate change disproportionately affects the well-being of youth.

Crisis management frameworks typically address ‘natural’ disasters as isolated environmental events. However, our review highlights persistent social struggles faced by Indigenous communities in the context of climate change—challenges rooted in a colonial history of environmental degradation, land dispossession, and socio-economic marginalization. We aim to demonstrate that current crisis management strategies often overlook the structural drivers of climate vulnerability.

This review contributes to the panel’s conceptualization of 'Just' Planetary Health by advocating for a paradigm shift that transcends short-term crisis response to embrace long-term accountability and sustainability. By centring the experiences of Indigenous youth, we call for policies that address the drivers of socio-environmental vulnerability, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities involved in achieving 'health' amid climate change.

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My paper locates the planetary crisis in vulnerabilities of land alienation induced by extractive development projects in India's Jharkhand. It maps out political responses communities make, particularly in territorial forms deploying the threatened landscape itself as a political force.

Paper long abstract

This paper delves into the collective negotiations of extractive state-corporate power in eastern India. It situates an entanglement of state and corporation in land acquisition campaigns. Private companies' informal methods of social fragmentation have conjoined with government documentation tools, including expert surveys and studies, to give displacement an impression of inevitability. Yet, affected communities have interrupted the space-making power of the state to take control of or negate landscape and livelihood uncertainties. To unravel the ways communities manage threats of environmental and resource appropriation in the eastern state of Jharkhand, I take two methodical steps. First, I critically engage with the existing scholarship on the Indigenous Pathhalgadi movement to point out ontological erasures in the analyses as they do not adequately foreground the logic of lifeworld vulnerability at the centre of the movement. Second, I draw on my field research on a case of non-indigenous land struggle to explore how socio-environmental associations are politicised in mobilisation against formal procedures and informal tactics of land acquisition. Combining the two cases of collective management of resource vulnerability, the paper reckons territorial politics as a form of community response towards managing and evading socio-environmental crises. It brings into analysis visual and textual narrative material through which the vulnerable landscapes are turned into territories of public control. Centering the question of political power in resource management, the paper argues for considering possibilities of reconfiguring the state’s resource sovereignty at the hands of vulnerable yet resilient communities.