Paper short abstract

The paper unpacks the conservation debate in light of the top-down environmental policy initiatives implemented for the Mising tribal habitat in the Majuli island of Assam, India. It establishes that the statist conservation policies based on fixity disrupt the everyday life of the islanders.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the Majuli island in the northeast Indian state of Assam. It focuses on the Mising tribe, an environmentally and socially vulnerable community in the island. It understands the community’s traditional relationship with water. In the era of top-down conservation policy initiatives, the study looks at the human-nature interface in light of the state-sponsored climate coping mechanisms. It attempts to understand the interaction of the ‘scientificity’ claim of statist interventions with the indigenous knowledge of the Misings in coping with environment-induced threats. The paper revisits the colonial imagination that equated stability with land. This morphed to ownership of land as a requisite to claim legitimacy of residence in the post-colonial nation-state. This, in turn, is juxtaposed with permanence as a criterion to claim legitimate belonging. The Misings, on the other hand, are nomadic communities whose lifeworlds have been shaped by fragility and impermanence. The paper, therefore, questions ‘fixity’, a determinant to certify belonging and further understands how this is reflected in most conservation initiatives. While floods may be frequent events in Majuli, the residents have intimate relationships with water (Lahiri–Dutt and Samanta 2013). It is hence characterised by belonging and intimacy and not much by hostilities. The paper looks into how the indigenous communities account for these initiatives and how these, in turn, impose fixity on their habitats. Hence, it disrupts their lifeworlds, discouraging movement, which is justified by the state that capitalises on land as a reference to legitimise habitation and residence.

Paper short abstract

Climate policy uncertainty reshapes how clean energy markets respond to oil price volatility in developing economies. Clean energy assets show resilience under uncertainty, with institutional quality mediating outcomes, highlighting the role of credible climate policy in energy transitions.

Paper long abstract

Climate policy uncertainty (CPU) is an increasingly important but underexplored factor shaping energy transitions in developing economies. While credible climate policies are essential for attracting renewable energy investment, many fossil-fuel-dependent countries face regulatory instability, volatile energy markets, and weak institutions. This paper examines how climate policy uncertainty influences the response of clean energy markets to oil price volatility in developing-country contexts.

Using clean energy index returns, global oil price data, and established CPU indicators, the study employs an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework with dynamic extensions to capture short- and long-run interactions. The findings show that climate policy uncertainty weakens the transmission of oil price volatility to clean energy markets, suggesting a partial decoupling from fossil fuel dynamics. Clean energy assets also exhibit resilience during periods of heightened uncertainty, indicating their potential role as hedging instruments. Importantly, institutional quality conditions these effects, highlighting the role of governance in shaping energy transition outcomes.

By providing evidence from underrepresented developing economies, the paper contributes to debates on energy transitions, climate governance, and development under uncertainty. The results underscore the need for predictable and credible climate policies to ensure that energy transitions support inclusive and sustainable development pathways.

Paper short abstract

Dominant climate governance frames change as a technical problem. Ethnography among Adivasi communities in Jharkhand highlights women-led relational climate imaginaries rooted in care, reciprocity and responsibility, offering alternative epistemic and political insights for global climate governance

Paper long abstract

Contemporary climate governance frames climate change as a technical, biophysical problem, privileging carbon metrics, managerial solutions and market-based mechanisms. Anthropological research in Indigenous contexts, however, reveals alternative understandings of climate causality. Ethnographic evidence from the adivasi mobilizations over jal, jangal, jamin in Jharkhand presents Indigenous climate imaginaries as grounded in an ethic of care, emphasizing reciprocity, responsibility and relational accountability among humans, non-humans, ancestors and territory. The processes of environmental degradation and climatic instability are explained as a consequence of broken relationships rather than an abstract systemic failure, thereby reflecting the long-term effects of colonial and capitalistic transformations that signal the importance of relational dwelling, pluriversal ecological politics and Indigenous approaches of climate responsibility. Many Indigenous practices - shifting cultivation (jhum), communal forest management and ritual engagements with land and water - have been subject to increasing regulation under contemporary environmental governance frameworks. These relational ethics are often sustained through the practices of Adivasi women, who have long been at the forefront of environmental protection. One example is Jamuna Tudu, a Santhal leader who mobilized local communities to protect forests from illegal logging in the Kolhan division of Jharkhand, through the foundation of the Van Suraksha Samiti in 1998. Her movement shows the cultural and spiritual significance of sal trees within Adivasi relational worldviews and confronts unsustainable deforestation. In our work, we try to highlight how these ethics of care and the Indigenous practices have come to form both an epistemic and a political input to global climate governance grounds.

Paper short abstract

Grounded in feminist political ecology and resilience theory, this qualitative study examines gendered perceptions of climate-resilient agriculture in coastal Bangladesh, showing women’s key adaptive roles and institutional and power constraints, calling for gender-equitable resilience pathways now.

Paper long abstract

This research examines gendered perceptions of climate-resilient agriculture (CRA), their roles in creating CRA, and gender-specific concerns relevant to resilience-building in the southwest coastal agricultural landscapes of Bangladesh. Grounded in feminist political ecology and resilience theory, the study employs a qualitative research design comprising 40 in-depth interviews, one focus group discussion, and 14 key informant interviews. The analysis explores how power relations, resource access, and institutional structures shape unequal adaptive capacities under climate stressors. Findings show that women play central roles in water collection, soil health management, homestead gardening, seed germination and transplantation, and poultry and livestock rearing—key to household and agro-ecological resilience. Across four analytical dimensions—access to adaptation technologies and validated practices, access to and availability of financial resources, policy and institutional support, and macroeconomic pressures—women in Shyamnagar have increasingly adopted climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices as everyday strategies of resilience. However, their adaptive capacity remains constrained by intersecting knowledge inequalities, structural and institutional barriers, and gendered power relations that limit decision-making authority and resource control. Consistent with feminist political ecology, the study demonstrates that adaptation initiatives are not inherently gender-equitable and may reproduce existing inequalities if gendered power dynamics are ignored. From a resilience perspective, sustainable and transformative adaptation requires addressing social differentiation alongside ecological change. The study recommends four strategic actions: (i) ensuring equitable access to resources and services, (ii) empowering women in agricultural decision-making processes, (iii) strengthening women farmers’ capacities through targeted CRA training, and (iv) promoting gender sensitization among male farmers to support inclusive resilience pathways.

Paper short abstract

Indigenous climate justice imaginaries are approached as methodological challenges to dominant climate research, exposing limits of techno-managerial models and calling for reflexive ways of producing climate knowledge for just futures, grounded in Indigenous epistemologies.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary climate research and governance rely on methodological frameworks that privilege abstraction, quantification, and techno-managerial intervention. While these approaches have expanded the capacity to model climate risk, they also constrain how climate justice, responsibility, and planetary futures are conceptualised. This paper approaches Indigenous climate justice imaginaries not as empirical inputs to be incorporated into existing climate regimes, but as methodological challenges to how climate knowledge itself is produced.

Situated within critical development studies and political ecology, the paper interrogates the epistemic assumptions embedded in dominant climate research practices, particularly those aligned with global policy architectures such as the UNFCCC, IPCC assessments, and national climate action plans. Indigenous imaginaries are engaged here as sites that foreground relationality, place-based responsibility, and more-than-human ethics, exposing the limits of methods that separate environment from society, knowledge from governance, and future planning from lived relations with land and water.

Rather than presenting Indigenous climate action as alternative solutions or best practices, the paper treats Indigenous imaginaries as epistemic interventions that unsettle dominant methodological commitments. It argues that engaging Indigenous climate justice requires methodological transformation, not merely inclusion, positioning reflexive research design as a precondition for just and plural climate futures.

Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on the Adivasis in the Mousuni Island of the Indian Sundarban in the state of West Bengal in Eastern India, and their experiences of living with climate change.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on the Adivasis in the Mousuni Island of the Indian Sundarban in the state of West Bengal in Eastern India, and their experiences of living with climate change. Based on the field study conducted between 2021-23, this paper reveals the peculiar case of the Santal Adivasis with a unique history intertwined with colonialism, post-colonial development, and the struggles for survival in the middle of the challenges posed by cyclones, floods, and sea level rise. The Island is one of the most climate-vulnerable regions, and the Adivasi villages are closer to the river and sea, where many Adivasi homes have either shifted multiple times from where they lived before or are currently in dangerously rising water due to climate change. Adivasi communities are engaged in riskier and more precarious occupations with livelihoods dependent on water, weather patterns, and natural cycles unique to the Island that has evolved here for centuries. These interconnected relationships of the Adivasi communities on the Island make them more vulnerable to any event of climate change than other communities. The climate vulnerability reinforced by the structural inequalities puts Adivasis into a more precarious vulnerability. Beyond these structural vulnerabilities, Adivasi groups in the Island experience multiple discriminatory experiences during and in the aftermath of cyclones and floods.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Indigenous Peoples' epistemologies and self-governance structures fundamentally challenge dominant urban development paradigms in India.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how Indigenous Peoples' epistemologies and self-governance structures fundamentally challenge dominant urban development paradigms in India. Through a comparative field analysis of Fifth and Sixth Schedule constitutional provisions governing tribal areas, I demonstrate that development outcomes are not merely technical matters but deeply political questions of who holds authority to define, design, and implement development.

The study reveals two diametrically opposed approaches: the Fifth Schedule's paternalistic model, which excludes tribes from decision-making and has resulted in “adverse inclusion”—integration accompanied by systematic land dispossession and marginalisation—versus the Sixth Schedule's Autonomous District Council system, which vests development authority in Indigenous communities themselves, enabling them to protect their interests while participating in governance. I foreground Indigenous epistemologies that understand land not as individual property but as collective territory interwoven with identity, memory, and sustainable lifeways.

This paper contributes a decolonial methodology by adopting “ethnographic refusal” and interdisciplinary analysis (history, law, sociology, politics) to centre Indigenous constitutional rights and knowledge systems. It demonstrates how returning land control and decision-making authority to Indigenous communities—what I term “self-autonomy in Indigenous urbanism”—offers not only justice but radically different, sustainable urban futures. The comparative cross-regional approach reveals which institutional arrangements enable genuine inclusion versus those that perpetuate exclusion despite inclusive rhetoric.

By interrogating whose knowledge legitimises development and demanding that Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples become primary stakeholders rather than subjects of development, this work charts practical pathways for dismantling extractive development models and reimagining urban futures grounded in Indigenous sovereignty and epistemology.