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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.