Table Of ContentRegional Political Ecologies and
Environmental Conflicts in India
This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental
conflicts in India. It broadly explores landscape-based analyses of political,
economic and social issues which impact environmental changes, challenges
and conflicts at local and micro-local levels.
The chapters in this volume examine the intervention of different
stakeholders in the management of various regional ecological landscapes
in India, including forests, rivers, canals, creeks and wetlands. The volume
is an interdisciplinary endeavour, weaving together contextual narratives
through a combination of approaches from sociology, anthropology,
geography, political studies and environmental history. Using such core
approaches, the book studies the place-based dynamisms within the regional
environmental conflicts in the selected conservation landscapes. It provides
empirical reflections on transboundary issues, rural–urban transitions,
middle-class environmentalism, identity conflicts, decentralized natural
resource management and the role of political institutions.
Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India will
be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Ecology and South
Asian Environmental Studies.
Sarmistha Pattanaik is Associate Professor at the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Faculty of Centre for Policy
Studies (CPS) and Centre for Urban Science and Engineering (C-USE),
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India.
Amrita Sen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal,
India.
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Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India
Edited by Sarmistha Pattanaik and Amrita Sen
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Regional Political Ecologies
and Environmental Conflicts
in India
Edited by Sarmistha Pattanaik
and Amrita Sen
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sarmistha Pattanaik and Amrita Sen;
individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-48642-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-41782-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-48643-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367486433
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgments viii
1 Introduction: Understanding Regional Political Framings
of Environmental Conflicts in India 1
SARMISTHA PATTANAIK AND AMRITA SEN
2 Heritage or Basic Human Rights?: Politics of
Environmentalism Surrounding the Adi Ganga in Kolkata 11
JENIA MUKHERJEE, SHREYASHI BHATTACHARYA AND LINA BOSE
3 The Opportunities and Challenges of Transboundary
Conservation – Solutions in Adaptive Management 29
RADHIKA BHARGAVA
4 Riverbank Erosion and Inter-Community Relationships
in Majuli: Political Implications of a Changing
Landscape in Assam 49
AVIJIT SAHAY
5 A Regional Political Ecology of the Changing City-Scape
and the Crisis of Conservation of the East Kolkata
Wetlands (EKW), India 65
SANA HUQUE
vi Contents
6 Land Ownership and Ecological Knowledge Production
from a Gender and Power Dynamics Perspective in a
Village in Nagaland, N.E. India 91
A. WATI WALLING
7 Political Ecology of Natural Resource Governance in
Chhattisgarh, India: Critical Ethnographic Reflections on
Vulnerable Livelihoods of the Scheduled Tribes in Bastar 110
JANMEJAYA MISHRA
Index 125
Contributors
Radhika Bhargava, PhD scholar, Department of Geography, National
University of Singapore.
Shreyashi Bhattacharya, PhD scholar, Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the
Science of Happiness, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Lina Bose, PhD scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Sana Huque, Post-Doctoral fellow at ATREE, Bangalore and a former
Research Associate with Environment Support Group, Bangalore, India.
Janmejaya Mishra, PhD scholar at Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies
(ADCPS), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.
Jenia Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.
Avijit Sahay, Post-doctoral scholar, Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India,
A. Wati Walling, Assistant Professor and Head, Department of Science
and Humanities (Sociology), National Institute of Technology (NIT)
Nagaland, Chumukedima, Dimapur, Nagaland, India.
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to sincerely thank all the contributors for their
insightful research, open engagement and timely communication of their
chapters to this edited volume. At the same time, we appreciate the patience
of all the contributors for their support – starting from the conception to the
final submission. This edited volume would not have been a finished one
without the expertise of these stellar researchers.
Many thanks to the entire Routledge team – it has been a joy indeed to
work with them. We would like to sincerely thank the team and their associ-
ates for their professionalism, continuous support, patience and excellent
coordination throughout different stages of development of this volume:
particularly Matt Shobbrook, Editorial Assistant.
Finally, we are grateful for all the comments received from the poten-
tial reviewers at the time of review, which helped us to make substantial
improvements to this volume. However, we take full responsibility for the
deficiencies.
Sarmistha Pattanaik
Amrita Sen
1 Introduction
Understanding Regional Political
Framings of Environmental
Conflicts in India
Sarmistha Pattanaik and Amrita Sen
Analyzing environmental conflicts in India necessitates attention to mul-
tiple ways in which claims to natural resources are established by a range
of sub-national and global actors. Many such conflicts, being region-
ally positioned, render an appropriate scope of applying a framework of
regional political ecology (RPE) to incorporate an understanding on scalar
political contexts of human-inhabited landscapes. RPEs can be significant
in explaining landscape-based analyses of the interplay of political, eco-
nomic and social factors influencing environmental conflicts in the current
decades, characterized by newer institutional approaches to environmen-
tal governance (Paavola, 2007; Wilshusen, 2019; Kashwan, McLean &
García-López,2019). Introduced by Blaikie and Brookfield in 1987 in their
book Land Degradation and Society, RPE implied a ‘broad based approach
encompassing a variety of scales, methodologies and conclusions regarding
the cause of land degradation’ (Black, 1990: 35–36). It was an epistemic
attempt to look into environmental crisis (land degradation in the specific
case) as manifested by plural and regionally specific processes, accounted
in the wider political economy of natural resource management. In this vol-
ume, the intention is to highlight how regional approaches and the utility of
specificities ‘scale-up’ rational generalizations on the political construction
of ecologies across the globe.
Socio-environmental and political changes are contextually specific, and
despite having a geographical coherence, they are often in a state of ambigu-
ity and contestability, urging an explicit independent inquiry (Walker, 2016:
125). Region, as Galt (2016) points out, matters in the making of this inquiry,
making its way through binaries in exploring bounded territories with dis-
tinct political ecological imageries. RPE aims to transcend representative
global framings, which are often applied on local fields poorly positioned
to contextualize such broad-based comparative analysis (Walker, 2003: 7).
It also aims to apply inter-regional political framings on meso-geographic
DOI: 10.4324/9780367486433-1
