Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Ipshita Basu
(University of Westminster)
Sudheesh Ramapurath Chemmencheri (National Law School of India University)
Ekata Bakshi (Policy and Development Advisory Group)
Vinita Damodaran (University of Sussex)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Aashish Xaxa
(Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar)
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Energy transitions and environmental justice
Short Abstract:
Conceptualise 'Just' Planetary Health by re-examining crisis management through the perspective of time: environmental histories of ecological degradation, and the perspective of depth: power relations which underpin changing landscapes and the way communities manage hidden uncertainty every day.
Description:
Natural hazards, epidemics and hunger deaths prompt urgent developmental action but what happens after the crisis recedes? News headlines blur, relief packages morph into dusty parcels and volunteers return home. However, causes of planetary ill-health are rooted in long histories of colonial and postcolonial environmental and social extraction- and its dire consequences are borne overwhelmingly by indigenous people and socially/spatially marginalised groups. Thus, while crisis management treats 'crisis' as compartmentalised phenomenon, the affected communities see crises as interconnected experiences which have lingering and hidden consequences due to the absence of historical accountability for long-term environmental exploitation.
This panel aims to conceptualise 'Just' Planetary Health by re-examining crisis management through two perspectives, combined. The perspective of time: that is through environmental histories of how landscapes were changed for commercial/conservationist aims by reorganising social-environmental relations. The perspective of depth: that is power relations which produce environmental uncertainty and its management; and how communities make webs of connections to respond to the hidden, everyday consequences of living in fragile/marginal environments.
We invite papers that address the panel theme from different methodological and empirical standpoints. Selected papers will be published in a journal special issue. The 90-minute panel will be organised as: i) participants submit draft papers, which will be organised under 2-3 sub-themes. ii) paper presenters make a 5-minute intervention, followed by commentary by the discussant who will identify conceptual synergies between papers iii) panel participants discuss the cross-over themes and overarching contribution of the special issue.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper 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.
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.
Paper short abstract:
The paper asks i) how different experiences of famines continue to shape people’s lives in the region and ii) the paper seeks to understand what kind of social relations, amicable and antagonistic, remain within and between villages as response to the droughts in Tharparkar, Pakistan
Paper long abstract:
The identity of Tharparkar is tethered to rain, droughts and famines. Tharparkar is a semi-arid land in the province of Sindh bordering India. Whereas these disasters cause inhumane implications on the residents and animals of the region, these same narratives have come to stand and define the identity of the residents too. The story of colonial famines still functions to define a vital identity of resistance from the residents in the postcolonial state, whilst the recent famines resulted in actions by the state, the non-governmental organisations, and aid agencies.
In the last ten years, Tharparkar has become a site of extraction. Within coal mining and energy projects, Thar has experienced a surge in the construction of roads and usage of social media. It has gained both physical and digital connectivity. Whilst at the same time, the transfer of agriculture and common grazing grounds, water depletion, and other ecological issues have exacerbated living conditions.
With the perspective of time, the paper asks how different experiences of famines continue to shape people’s lives in the region. In relation to the perspective of depth, the paper seeks to understand what kind of social relations, amicable and antagonistic, remain within and between villages as response to the droughts. The next famine could be consequential and requires our urgent understanding of the social and cultural parapet against previous crises.
Paper short abstract:
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.
Paper short abstract:
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.
Paper short abstract:
Paper critiques the developmental framing of environmental crisis & its dehistoricized understanding of TEK. By highlighting Adivasi dispossession and commercial agenda of colonial & postcolonial states, it calls for historically embedded solutions that integrate surviving Adivasi knowledge systems.
Paper long abstract:
Historically analyzing contemporary forest governance strategies in Ranchi, Gumla, and Dumka districts of Jharkhand, this paper critiques the developmental framing of the environmental crisis and its resolution through the revival of traditional-ecological-knowledge (TEK). By foregrounding the unjust alienation of Adivasis from their lands and forests by colonial policies like the Permanent Settlement Act (1793), which transformed the forests of Chotanagpur from Adivasi habitations into production landscapes, the paper emphasizes how Adivasi survival acts eroded TEK, now rendered irrelevant by dominant laws. The dispossession of Khuntkattidars and Bhuinhars by Zamindars undermined Adivasi perspectives of forests as extensions of their homes, requiring periodic renewal; reducing them to economic resources – which degraded over time and contributed to the contemporary environmental crisis.
Postcolonial forest governance perpetuated this extractive relationship by emphasizing the right to sale of Non-Timber-Forest-Produce (NTFP) as the primary and often only form of reparative justice. The production-centric framework rendered Adivasi cultural and ecological practices for habitat renewal irrelevant and the systemic exclusion and generational impoverishment of Adivasis amplified this erosion. Notional constitutional remedies like Forest Rights Act (2006) and PESA did little to address the loss of ecological knowledge tied to land alienation.
Thus, the paper critiques simplistic approaches to revival of TEK for forest conservation to mitigate climate crisis and argues for rebuilding indigenous knowledge-systems through institutional acknowledgment of the historial politico- epistemic oppression. It demands that a justice-focused framework be developed that reimagines forest-governance beyond a limited rights-based approach, integrating surviving Adivasi ethics, to respond to environmental crises.
Paper short abstract:
The estuarine regions of the coastal state of Kerala, India are living with a quiet, insidious form of shifting waters—that of tidal floods. Focussing on Kochi city, this paper examines how these arrhythms of waters affect lives and livelihoods, and yet remain absent in climate conversations.
Paper long abstract:
The state of Kerala, along monsoonal India’s southern-western coast encountered its worst floods in a century in 2018. Every year since, Kerala’s routine annual encounter with kaalavarsham or the southwest monsoons, has been marked with uncharacteristic floods and cyclonic activity. This paper focuses on another set of less spectacular, planetary phenomena that have since begun to make itself felt along its estuarine regions: that of accelerated, but much quieter – and more insidious, tidal floods. This paper focusses on the estuarine region on the northern frontier of Kochi city, Kerala’s commercial capital, where, for centuries, communities have lived off seasonal cyclical cultivation of shrimp and the indigenous, saline-tolerant pokkali paddy varietal. In what is a highly engineered wetscape, this cyclical practice offered a mode of living and working that engages with, and manages annual monsoonal and oceanic tidal patterns. In short, this wetscape worked with a series of interconnected temporalities of moving waters. Where networks of streams, farms and lagoons would absorb seasonal rises and withdrawals, today, brackish waters enter homes unannounced. More importantly, they refuse to leave. These newer forms of floodings affect more than 20,000 households in this one district alone. And yet, it has found no mention in the state’s climate change policies. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographically informed examination of this region, this paper reports on the ways that these shifting patterns have radically altered life. Second, this paper opens up existing frameworks of “disaster,” its affordances and its limits, in the context of climate change.
Paper short abstract:
Situates the notion of 'energy crisis' in mountain communities of Pakistan to explore the impact of Belt and Road initiative- China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Paper long abstract:
This paper delves into the nuanced backdrop of energy crisis in Hunza and the role of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in worsening the crisis whilst perpetuating several precarities. Using feminist and oral history frameworks, this study investigates the everyday experiences of people who are susceptible to the precarities induced by transnational infrastructure and development projects. Moreover, it argues how the use of the notion ‘energy crisis’ in recent protests and news escalates the idea that ‘energy crisis’ is a new phenomenon while erasing the local inhabitants’ experiences that emanate from unjust structures which have been exploiting both the people and nature of Hunza for decades. It also interrogates, if the use of the discourse ‘energy crisis’ in policy debates actually addresses the deeply entrenched inequities resulting from colonialism and environmental extractivism.
Keywords: energy crisis, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), precarities, Hunza, colonialism, environmental extractivism.