Paper short abstract:

In parts of coastal India climate change impacts citizenship via two dimensions of politics: infrastructure and localized political relations. While this illustrates the reworking of state relations by environmental transformations themselves, it also underscores the need to rethink citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

There is little disagreement today that the current environmental predicament demands a reconfiguration of the political. In this talk I will add an empirical dimension to these timely debates. Making use of on an ethnographic approach, I will interrogate transformations of quotidian state relations by environmental transformations associated with climate change.

Drawing on fieldwork in the Indian Sundarbans, I will argue that environmental degradations (including but not limited to anthropogenic climate change) may very well entail a weakening of claims on citizenship. This does not involve constitutional rights as such, but refers to the messy terrain in which rights and entitlements are playing out at the margins. Climate change, I argue, impacts localized struggles to belong to the polity and to secure entitlements qua citizenship along two dimensions of politics that are crucial for the survival of marginalized population, but are still neglected in political theory. That is, the social life of infrastructure as nodes of state-populations encounters; and localized relations towards bureaucrats and politicians. As much as climate change translates into the dismantling of infrastructure and the displacement of bureaucracies, it involves, I argue, a further weakening of claims on citizenship.