Presentation short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bihar, India, this paper examines how digital climate platforms reproduce colonial extraction patterns through 'algorithmic coloniality' whilst women farmers organised through Self-Help Groups demonstrate sophisticated resistance and collective alternatives.

Presentation long abstract

Climate adaptation increasingly deploys digital platforms claiming to democratise agricultural knowledge, yet in Bihar, India, over 40 agricultural applications circulate despite minimal farmer adoption. This paper examines this paradox through 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Dalit and Other Backward Caste farmers, women extension workers, and digital service providers across Bihar's Vaishali and Gaya districts, exploring the 'productive tension' between algorithmic governance and vernacular climate politics.

The analysis theorises 'algorithmic coloniality' (Couldry and Mejias, 2019, 2024; Machen and Nost, 2021) to capture how digital climate infrastructure extends colonial extraction patterns through computational systems that privilege certain knowledge forms, centralise decision-making, and produce strategic blindness about caste-differentiated vulnerability. This operates through epistemic violence devaluing embodied knowledge, data extraction circuits serving corporate interests, caste-blind vulnerability assessments, and gendered technology access concentrating benefits amongst privileged groups. These dimensions resonate with Sultana's (2022) theorisation of climate coloniality.

Yet women farmers organised through Self-Help Groups (SHGs) demonstrate sophisticated agency through selective technology appropriation, collective knowledge validation, and organised resistance to exploitative labour conditions. BAMCEF-affiliated farmers articulate Ambedkarite climate politics linking vulnerability to caste oppression whilst maintaining technological proficiency, demanding education, land redistribution, and structural transformation rather than algorithmic fixes. This echoes Reddy's (2021) call for abolition ecology. These vernacular counterpolitics challenge both adaptation's epistemologies and materialities, revealing that just transitions require not better algorithms but fundamental restructuring of agrarian relations. The paper advances debates on digital agricultural futures by centring subaltern voices and demonstrating how community-based alternatives contest technocratic climate governance.