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Paper short abstract

Focusing on the Monpa people in Arunachal Pradesh, this paper argues that Indigenous climate agency cannot be reduced to unified cosmological resistance. It examines generational fracture and the existential costs of accelerated development for small Highland communities in the Eastern Himalayas.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the environmental ontologies and climate imaginaries of the Monpa group which lives in the western part of Arunachal Pradesh in the Eastern Himalayas. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork, it argues that Monpa engagements with environmental change and feelings of loss do not render to a technical equation nor a unified imaginary. Rather, Monpa orientations toward environment, development, and futurity are shaped by historically layered and internally differentiated ontological frameworks: a Tibetan Buddhist cosmology of sentient interdependence and karmic temporality, a relational order populated by non-human custodians of landscape, and more recently, the aspirational and disruptive imaginaries introduced through state-led development, border governance, and market integration.

The paper attends particularly to the generational fractures produced by these competing epistemological worlds. While Monpa political elites have successfully mobilised sacred geography to contest hydropower development, younger community members navigate contradictory pressures between formal education, limited economic opportunity, and the erosion of the symbolic orders through which ecological relationships were previously made intelligible and liveable. The paper proposes that understanding small-population highland communities as climate-relevant political subjects requires attending not only to their cosmological resources and governance capacities, but to the affective and existential dimensions of ontological plurality under conditions of accelerated change. This has significant implications for how Indigenous agency is theorised within global climate governance frameworks.