Thread by @ritodhi_c

What is climate reductionism and how does it fail to address the powerful causes of precarity for agrarian households in South Asia?

This article is a great example of how discourses/strategies of ‘adaptation’ act like an ‘anti-politics’ machine.

A (long) thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/MongabayIndia/status/1558974512640712709

1/n To begin with what is climate reductionism? Mike Hulme in is seminal 2011 essay points to the demise of environmental determinism (and climate determinism) which used to be an ideological wellspring of colonial perceptions of the world and its subsequent domination

2/n ...by cultures and communities of Europe, and the rise of climate reductionism which is the tendency to isolate and claim the climate as the most important ‘determinant of past, present and future system behaviour’.

3/n In short, it is the creation of simplistic causal pathways to hyper complex events emerging from dynamic structural issues such as famine, food insecurity or war to changes in the climate.

4/n In South Asia environmental determinism used to be the modus operandi of a variety of land use and land management strategies developed and used by the European colonizers.

5/n however, in recent years, with the emerging ‘threat’ of climate impacts, SA places, communities and ecologies have been formally rendered through a climate reductionist prism, building off the acute ‘developmentality’ of the industrial neo-extractive state.

6/n Two great explorations of this ‘climate change industry’ are @marcustaylor Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation and @CameliaDewan Misreading the Bengal Delta.

7/n Returning to this article, there are four key problems. First, the authors begin with a statistic on food waste, food insecurity and hunger.

8/n Drawing a causal line between changes in biogeochemical cycles and ‘hunger’ or ‘waste’ is not just problematic but exhibits an alarming degree of depoliticization and artificiality.

9/n Even more problematic is setting up an argument with ‘climate change’ as a hook and then transitioning into a link which opens a technomanagerial project driven by ‘food waste supply chain fixes’ financially and politically driven by the Netherlands.

10/n The political economy of agrarian supply chains in India is a controversial, sub-nationally contextual, intersectional quagmire.

11/n We literally lived through a grassroots movement, which required trans-ideological support across activists, civil society, farmers, and more formal institutions to take on insidious central government attempts at subjugating regional markets and non-elite supply chains.

12/n Any conversation about ‘food supply chains’ in India or broader South Asia sans engaging with such politics, is ‘reductionist’ and honestly, irresponsible.

13/n Second, the categorial separation of CC from food insecurity is problematic and artificial. The entangled process through which social-ecological systems come to be, make it so that, the natural science culture of ‘keeping everything else constant’ is impossible to do.

14/n Even mentioning food insecurity on parity conceptually with climate change is an illogical conceptual act – it is comparing apples to oranges, and therefore cannot be grouped together.

15/n Furthermore, using the same logic, ‘floods, droughts and temperature extremes’ also do not emerge from a similar ‘climate-society’ relational wellspring.

16/n For example, floods in the north east in India are a product of indiscriminate hydropower expansion, neoextractive state industries, acontextual urban planning, imported design cultures of house construction, sewage systems, and essentially land use change.

17/n Yes Climate change does play a role, but as many scholars and activists have mentioned, the stringent management of the regions dynamic fluvial land water systems into sedentary, energy production driven waterscapes, is wreaking havoc on the region.

18/n The impacts of hydropower mimic the impacts of CC, see the work of the brilliant @DrCRampini journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

19/n Also in the same argument, the categorization of a ‘hot spot’ essentially creates those hard spatial boundaries driven by top-down risk assessment metrics which fail to understand the rhizomic nature of these communities and ecologies.

20/n Third, the three strategies of transformative adaptation, elevational movement, contextual agrarian calendars and incorporation of new technologies do not sum up to adaptation, those are literally the foundations of agriculture. There is no agriculture without adaptation.

21/n The question to be asked is, a) How is a focus on ‘adaptation’ through discourse or policy supporting these actions by farmers on the ground? B) How is multiscalar precarity (household to regional scale) addressed by bringing in the impacts of CC?

22/n Given the fact, as the authors themselves mention in passing, the variety of structural impediments to ‘transformative adaptation’ from land tenure to labour.

23/n Also, all the examples provided by the authors, be it char dwellers growing rice, or fish farming or the diversification of the horticultural basket has been practiced and is a mainstay of ‘developmental policy’ in South Asia. So how is ‘adaptation’ any different?

24/n Four, it is problematic that in their section looking to the future and institutional inputs, the focus remains on the nation scale policy instruments which fail to address the enduring questions of inequality and justice, which are the major drivers of agrarian distress.

25/n Millets are all well and good, but their inclusion within the agrarian calendar is not an innovation, if anything it is the reclamation of a ‘pre-green’ revolution super food, by ecomodernist supply chains.

26/n Because, even today, in villages across India, the human-nature relationships which place millets at the heart of diets and fields are being subjugated both by cultural devices of modernity and industrial agriculture.

27/n It is a fallacy to characterise agrarianism of small farmers as a short sighted act or investment, when intergenerational transfer of material and cultural decision making proves the exact opposite.

28/n And neither is the state myopic, it is setting up a grab bag of agrarian distress which echo the technomanagerial tool kit it possess.

29/n Finally, here are two considerations. First, drawing causal chains from probable climate changes to agrarian transformation, even without considering the above ‘structural factors’ is incredibly erratic.

30/n Downscaled climate models are famously unreliable when it comes to their ability to transfer changes in precipitation regimes to yields.

31/n For that matter, modelling horticultural crops are near impossible, unless all links with ‘ground’ reality are abandoned. C4 vs. C3 crop futures are very different, as is the problems associated with incorporating standardized management decisions into overall yield models

32/n Second, any conversation about agrarian issues in south Asia which fail to consider the enduring legacies of caste, patriarchy, religious othering, colonial land management, ethnonationalism, or the political economy of multiscalar supply chains is incredibly reductionist

33/n Human-nature relationships emerge from this crucible of contention, which are unrepresented in the literature about ‘tipping points’ and state agricultural extension agencies and international agro-industrial entities are doing little to assuage such inequalities.

34/n What agrarian families, especially small farmers in south Asia need is not transformative adaptation, but transformative justice.
Not simply to survive, but to thrive in the Anthropocene the focus has to be on dismantling the historical inequalities that undergird our rural

35/n So, what would social ecological precarity reducing transformative justice look like in agrarian South Asia? I am not sure, but I think these are some possible avenues.

36/n First, centering ‘non-elite and more-than-colonial’ relationships with land. What does this look like on the ground? For example, It can emerge as support for informal land use relationships produced by lower caste communities.

37/n Such interventions actively subvert the elite control over both means of production and the historical capture of commons management within many communal settings.

38/n These mobilisations simultaneously challenge the white middle class environmentalism driven eco-modernist utopia promised by global north ‘supply chain consultants’, while also retaliating against pre-colonial forms of subjugation which scaffold our agrarian spaces.

39/n Emerging literature at the intersections of caste and environmentalism are a fertile ground for such strategies (See recent work by @maliniranga )

40/n Second, by supporting the ongoing defiance by agrarian households to challenge their institutional and political categorisation as static and spatially bound by the formal cartographic divisions of the nation state.

41/n For example, the revenue or census based spatial bordering of households or villages as ‘static’ entities, is another artificial artefact that attempts to delegitimise the mobility, spatial extension and territorial presence of the agrarian household. T

42/n This daily fluidity practiced in communion with equally fluid landscapes (such as the Brahmaputra’s waterscapes) provides a powerful material and cultural resource, that at once responds to the mercurial climate-society relationships and to the many clamouring state organs

43/n Growing paddy on chars literally contradicts the ‘long term’ solutions suggested. Without resolving the question of belonging to a land, whose political characteristics when drawn from the nation, seem to be at odds with its plural land-water states of being,

44/n there can be no long term ‘resilience’ or for that matter even incremental moves towards addressing generational inequalities.

45/n Our allyship towards these communities and ecologies should be to support their daily defiance of the spatial prisons (eg. Hot spots, village boundaries) which are sold to them as salvation.

46/n Third, the real life of ‘adaptation’, as emerging in South Asia, seems to be a strategy to address the donor fatigue of ODA, which is ‘tired’ of addressing poverty, inequality and development and has now moved onto ‘climate change’ as the new flavour of the month.

47/n The focus still remains enmeshed in the edicts of the Truman Doctrine, to develop the ‘hungry’, ‘starving’ of the ‘third world’, only now such images have been replaced by ‘climate refugees’ and ‘victims of climate catastrophe’.

48/n Rebecca Klenk asked a decade ago in Kumaon, “Who is a developed woman?”, if that question is asked today, it might emerge as “Who is an adapted woman?”,

and the answers, much like in Klenk’s account are as exclusionary and as rooted in an unholy rendition of ‘feminism’, which represents little of the myriad aspirations of women in agrarian south asia.

50/n The industry that now supports the ‘developmental mission’ of a colonial and capitalist future wears the garb of adaptation.

51/n An adaptation industry that fails to reconcile the idea that rain-fed agrarianism is impossible without adaptation, and therefore, all south Asian farmers have been adapting for millennia.

52/n An adaptation industry that does not critically engage with the fact that ‘vulnerability does not fall from the sky’, and the entangled structure-agency battles that are ongoing in agrarian south Asia remain unresolved, and in their unresolution, precarity builds a home.

53/n And finally, an adaptation industry that supports certain rural futures, ones which echo climate solutions that still remain firmly entrenched in the rule of ‘experts’ and is willing to sacrifice the aspirations of a multitude of agrarian communities to support such a vision

54/n It bears to be repeated, what agrarian communities in south Asia need is transformative justice.

#justice #climate #reductionism

55/n If you have read this far (why?) but I have been engaging with these issues for a decade now and am working on various projects with wonderful collaborators. See some upcoming 'items' below 👇

1. With @mh_cooper I am working on a paper which looks at Colonial Carbon's biases against certain rural futures and its progression through a sacrificial rurality in the upcoming @Peasant_Journal special issue

2. With @sitavenkateswar exploring carbon policy's acute terrestrial bias and new ways of imagining water-land binaries, through settler-indigenous relationships in Oceania

3. With Aline Carrara exploring 'Non-elite and more-than-colonial environmentalisms' through examples from lower caste mobilisations in Uttarakhand and Indigenous fire management in the Brazilian Cerrado.

4. With @DrCRampini and @PasangYangjee we have an article (hopefully forthcoming) which looks at a trans-Himalayan Adaptation politics, exploring emergent subjects and places

5. With @PasangYangjee and the @unfoundation I have been working on 'Knowledge Justice in the IPCC' and will be organising a panel at COP 27

6. With Aline Carrara and some others beginning a project at the intersections of racialized migrant communities in #Aotearoa and environmentalism.