- Convenor:
-
Ajmal Khan AT
(Shiv Nadar University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chairs:
-
Nikas Kindo
(Tata Institute of Social Sciences)
ann-elise lewallen (University of California, Santa Barbara)
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Climate justice, just transitions & environmental futures
Short Abstract
This panel explores how Indigenous climate justice imaginaries challenges the global climate regime, underscoring the ethical and political importance of Indigenous action and resistance in advancing planetary sustainability.
Description
As the impacts of the anthropogenic climate crisis are deepening across the globe, one of the most impacted groups, indigenous people are advancing transformative alternatives that challenge dominant techno-managerial and market responses to climate change. Rooted in place-based knowledge, relational ethics, and long histories of ecological stewardship, indigenous communities are leading climate action.From the forest guardianship and territorial self-governance in the Amazon to the Arctic to community-led forest and water management in South Asia and the Pacific, Indigenous groups continue to resist and redefine extractivist development, including climate action as part of the global climate regime.
This panel seeks to interrogate the tensions between indigenous climate justice imaginaries and the global climate change regime, foregrounding the ethical and political significance of indigenous climate actions and resistance for planetary sustainability. The panel brings together scholars, practitioners, and members of the indigenous groups to examine how indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, practices, and experiences advance climate action. We invite comparative perspectives on the ways in which indigenous groups mobilize themselves, local governance, customary law, and spiritual practices as tools of resistance and renewal. We invite papers that explore this theme, but are not limited to the following specific topics.
1. Indigenous Epistemologies and Imaginaries of Climate Action
2. Indigenous Climate Action
3. Resistance, Governance, and Territorial Autonomy
4. Indigenous Contributions to UNFCCC, IPCC assessments, and National Climate Action Plans
5. Indigenous Data, Data Sovereignty
6. Indigenous Youth and Climate Justice Movements
7. Climate Change and Indigenous Futurisms
8. Climate Tech and Indigenous Groups
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This study examines how climate shocks affect livelihoods and migration decisions in Lubra, a 14-household Indigenous Bon community in Mustang, Nepal, using mixed methods to assess impacts on income, food security, and adaptation, migration, or relocation choices.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates how climate shocks are transforming livelihood security and migration decisions among the Indigenous Bon community of Lubra Village in Mustang, Nepal. Lubra, with only fourteen households, lies in a climate-sensitive trans-Himalayan region experiencing intensified glacial melt, erratic rainfall, and recurrent flash floods. These climatic disruptions have damaged farmland, reduced agricultural yields, and heightened uncertainty about the long-term viability of the settlement. For Bon community, whose spiritual traditions emphasize deep ecological relationships and place-based identity, environmental change carries both material and cultural consequences. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines a household survey with semi-structured interviews and group discussions to capture both measurable impacts and lived experiences. Quantitative data assess shifts in income, food security, livestock, and livelihood stability following recent climate shocks. Qualitative narratives provide insight into how households interpret these changes, the coping strategies they employ, and the factors shaping their choices between in-situ adaptation, temporary migration, or potential relocation. The paper situates Lubra’s experience within broader debates on climate justice and Indigenous resilience, highlighting how small communities negotiate the pressures of environmental change while protecting cultural continuity. Rather than framing relocation as an inevitable response, the study emphasizes the community’s own aspirations, concerns, and imaginaries of a dignified future. The findings aim to offer localized evidence to inform culturally sensitive climate-resilience and relocation planning for of Lubra Village in Barhagaun Muktichhetra Municipality and contribute to understanding how Himalayan Indigenous communities navigate climate risks, mobility decisions, and the challenge of sustaining heritage in rapidly changing environments.
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
From India’s coal frontiers, this article shows how coal expansion, renewables, and afforestation advance together, producing cumulative Indigenous dispossession. It proposes “frontier climate governance” to show how transition reconfigures extraction rather than ending it.
Paper long abstract
This article examines India’s climate governance from the vantage point of its coal frontiers, where decarbonisation agendas intersect with entrenched extractive economies and Indigenous dispossession. While national and global climate frameworks emphasise renewable energy expansion, carbon neutrality, and narratives of a “just transition,” ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2024 in Jharkhand’s coal regions reveals a contradictory reality. Coal mining continues to expand alongside renewable energy projects, land reclamation initiatives, and compensatory afforestation schemes. For Indigenous communities, these processes generate cumulative forms of dispossession: agricultural land and forests are appropriated for mining, access to forest commons is restricted under afforestation and carbon sequestration regimes, and renewable infrastructures deliver limited livelihood security or local decision-making power.
The article develops the concept of frontier climate governance to capture how the energy transition in India does not follow a linear pathway away from fossil fuels. Instead, transition unfolds as a hyper-extractive process that reconfigures land, labour, and ecological relations while extending state and corporate control over Indigenous territories through climate policy instruments. Policies framed as environmentally progressive often deepen social and ecological inequalities by legitimising new enclosures and regulatory regimes in resource frontiers.
By centring Indigenous ecologies and practices of immobility—grounded in land-based livelihoods, cultural attachments, and everyday resistance—the article challenges dominant transition narratives that prioritise technological substitution and aggregate emissions reduction. It argues that a genuinely just transition in India requires climate governance to move beyond national targets and foreground Indigenous land rights, territorial justice, and locally grounded ecological futures.
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.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this paper reads Garhwali women’s folklore as testimony and traditional ecological knowledge, examining how gendered narratives of labour, loss, and care articulate ecofeminist perspectives on sustainability and climate action aligned with SDG 13.
Paper long abstract
This paper is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Garhwali women in the central Himalayan region of India and examines folk songs and oral narratives as forms of testimony through which environmental change, development, and gendered labour are articulated. Rather than treating folklore as cultural residue, the paper approaches these songs as repositories of traditional ecological knowledge that record shifts in forests, agriculture, water systems, and livelihoods over time.
Through an ecofeminist lens, the paper analyses how women’s narratives link ecological degradation with everyday experiences of care, subsistence work, and migration, revealing the uneven social costs of development and climate change. These oral testimonies challenge dominant sustainability discourses by foregrounding relational understandings of land, labour, and responsibility that remain marginal within formal climate policy frameworks. In doing so, they offer grounded perspectives on climate action that resonate with the principles of SDG 13 while remaining rooted in local life worlds.
By centering women’s voices, memory, and lived experience, the paper argues for the recognition of folklore as a critical site of knowledge production within climate debates. It contributes to discussions on Indigenous and community-based approaches to sustainability by demonstrating how Garhwali women’s narratives complicate technocratic models of climate governance and open up alternative ways of imagining environmental futures informed by care, reciprocity, and social justice.