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Paper short abstract

This paper argues, through narrative accounts from Northeast India, that non-economic loss becomes legible through situated ways of knowing that lie outside formal L&D systems and that these peripheral perspectives unsettle institutional understandings of Loss and Damage.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how non-economic Loss and Damage (NELD) can be understood in regions where it is not an established governance category. Using Northeast India as a case, it analyses the narrative and epistemic practices through which loss becomes recognisable. Rather than treating L&D as a technical field, the paper studies how dispersed accounts in media, platformed digital materials and oral accounts of environmental change come together to form vernacular registers of loss. These registers describe harms that dominant policy frameworks overlook. They point to land eroded without formal recognition, species and forest elements that no longer return, rivers that change course in ways that unsettle livelihoods, and disruptions in relations between people, soils, water, and nonhuman beings.

By analysing how environmental change is described through altered relations with landscapes and ecological processes, the paper shows that loss reflects structural conditions of vulnerability that formal L&D categories struggle to acknowledge. These accounts map responsibility in ways that diverge from institutional assessments and point to infrastructural decisions, extractive activity, and state neglect as drivers of slow and acute damage.

The paper argues that these vernacular loss registers expose the epistemic limits of climate governance, particularly its reliance on quantification and legally recognisable impacts. Narrative practices operate as political claims-making, producing their own criteria of evidence, accountability, and repair. Studying these registers provides a grounded basis for understanding how L&D is articulated at the peripheries of climate governance, before and beyond institutional recognition.