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Paper short abstract

This paper explores voluntary labour and climate change in the Indian Sundarbans. Analysing volunteering in relation to locally-led adaptation and claims for loss and damage, it shows the importance of a climate justice approach to volunteering and climate change in the global South.

Paper long abstract

Volunteers are increasingly positioned as critical climate actors, reflected in state and NGO strategies for climate adaptation and disaster response and popular celebrations of ‘hero’ volunteers during emergencies. Important interventions have highlighted the invisible labour of climate change, including the role of unpaid labour (Johnson et. al. 2023). But conceptualisations of volunteer labour and climate change in the global South are emergent and uneven. Policy and academic thinking are often rooted in global North experiences, focused on elite conservation practices or framed in terms of management challenges for disaster risk response. There have been limited critical interrogations of the relationships between voluntary labour and key conceptual and policy frameworks relating to climate change. This paper explores voluntary labour in the Indian Sundarbans in relation to the principles of locally led adaptation (Soanes et. al. 2021) and claims for loss and damage (e.g. Boyd et al. 2021). Through these dialogues, the paper locates volunteering’s civic, relational and political capacities at community level in relation to calls for climate justice. Moving beyond popular celebrations and state mobilisations, the paper identifies jumping off points for the development of a more inclusive and critical scholarship of volunteering and climate change in the global South.