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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.