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theses

This dissertation examines the narratives through which climate change discourse, policy and action emerge in Gujarat, India as shaped and produced by state and non-state actors and their potential outcomes for current and future adaptation strategies. Further, it investigates challenges of adaptation from communities’ perspective to illustrate the empirical relevance of on-going adaptation services as well as throw light on a range of factors that potentially undermine future adaptive capacities to climate change. In undertaking this investigation, this research contributes empirically and theoretically to the fields of political ecology, human-environment studies and adaptation research, through a critical examination of the ideas, technics, policy and practice that underlie climate change discourse and action in a specific socio-economic and political context. The key findings from this research indicate the following. First, the Gujarat government uses the nationally prescribed co-benefits approach to address the threat from climate change within an economic perspective that promises to reconcile economy and ecology. These have a number of effects. First, they privilege scientific and technological expertise in providing appropriate responses. Second, they emphasize economic efficiency in the use and management of resources. And, third, they recommend market incentives and regulation as appropriate mechanisms to respond. Moreover, the state’s narrative individuates the problem of climate change, putting the burden of its solution on individual choice and action and thereby de-linking it from the demands of a rapidly growing capitalist economy. However, alternative conceptions of climate change, as offered by radical actors, not only exist but also offer valuable and powerful resistances to the dominating co-benefits approach. Moreover this research indicates that in the context of climate change, radical actors see value in occupying existing spaces of contestations and engaging through formal institutional channels to represent their interests. Thus, radical actors are keen on making power relations that constitute climate change discourses localizable and contestable at various levels. Second, several barriers exist to make formally (and scientifically) conceived climate change adaptation responses effective. For example, an ongoing initiative that provides farmers with weekly weather forecasts and forecast-based agro-advisories suffers from low usability and poor ability to inform community responses. My research highlights the role of contextualized socio-political, ecological and economic factors such as village politics, depleting groundwater resources and unfavorable market conditions that limit the use of these advisories. Third, my research suggests that adaptation to climate change may be constrained by objectives of livelihood adaptation which appear as responses to economic, ecological, social and political processes. This is seen for example in the case of agro-pastoralists in Gujarat, who respond to stresses from market conditions, local ecology, socio-political marginalization and skewed policies by moving away from traditional pastoralism, which, in the past has offered a number of strategies to adapt from environmental stresses.

ETD_6937

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kalpana Venkatasubramanian

doi:10.7282/T3MG7RMB

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.