Seeking Climate Justice: Fossil Fuels and the Land Question in India

Keywords: climate justice, fossil fuels, land, India
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

Over the last three decades, India’s coal industry has been transformed from a state-owned monopoly into a vast assemblage of parastatal and multinational corporations. Drawing upon the case of how one of the largest proposed coal-fired power plants in south India has been disassembled, this paper calls for an analysis of the instabilities and vulnerabilities of global fossil fuel industries. The paper examines how a range of conjunctural events and elements—from the price and materiality of imported coal to unruly legal disputes over land and emergent movements for climate justice—have led to the fracturing of fossil fuel infrastructures. By tracking processes through which fossil fuels are being disassembled, the paper argues that the political project of climate justice requires moving beyond the limits of liberal conceptions of landed property and personhood. In particular, the paper demonstrates the ways in which emergent climate justice movements led by artisanal fishers have disrupted the coal industry’s attempts to enclose common lands by challenging framings of their lands as ‘waste’ through both litigation and popular protest. Such struggles for common lands challenge not only extractive fossil fuels, but also the normative assumptions of liberal regimes of private property that constitute limits for movements seeking climate justice.