Introduction

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain published a remarkable report in 1991 in which they differentiated between ‘survival emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that no other report has had a comparable impact on global debates and scholarship on climate justice. This distinction between survival and luxury emissions has been central to some of the most important pieces of scholarship and advocacy on climate justice (Shue 1993). Based on this report, common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) became the defining feature of the Indian government's position in international climate negotiations (Jasanoff 1993). Despite having such a massive influence on international climate negotiations, the distinction between survival and luxury emissions is rarely referenced in domestic climate policy debates. Even as climate disasters, including cyclones, floods, and heatwaves, become more intense, there is limited public debate on climate action and policy in India (J. Das 2020). On the other hand, while there is robust scholarship on India's climate policy and action in the international arena, engagement with questions of domestic climate justice within Indian academia is quite sparse (Fisher 2015; Chu and Michael 2019). The potential for domestic injustices was apparent even in 1991 and was duly acknowledged in the same Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) report that made CBDR foundational to India's position in international negotiations:

For a variety of reasons that require deeper inquiry, questions of domestic climate justice fell through the intertwined cracks of international climate change politics and sectoral silos that are endemic to both academic research and grassroots social movement organization (Gupta 2014). Many argued, quite appropriately, that the policy priority should be addressing issues of employment, food security, education, and primary healthcare for the poorest people in India and other countries in the Global South.

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.

Onam, the harvest festival of the Malayalis, marked the moment of departure in August 2001, when the Adivasis of Kerala planted ‘refugee huts’, the kutilkettysamaram, in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in protest against mass starvation deaths in their communities. The protest was historic and innovative; no other protest of this nature has ever been attempted anywhere else in India. What they sought was their right to livelihood resources – land for the landless. While there were several land struggles and movements by Adivasis in Kerala, the immediate provocation for them marching to the state capital was the report of 32 starvation deaths among Adivasis in and around Attappady and Wayanad, the tribal district in the state. They demanded a settlement outside the controversial Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999, passed by the state legislative assembly, which repealed the original Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. The Adivasi Dalit Samara Samithi (ADSS) argued that of the 75,000 Adivasi families in the state, 45,000 were landless, and the granting of 5 acres to each of those families would require the distribution of 2.25 lakh acres of land. The Adivasis, led by C.K. Janu – an Adiya woman who spearheaded the struggle – conducted their protest in an unprecedented manner. The struggle was considered successful by the ADSS, claiming that their demands for lands were met, at least partly, by the government. When no action was taken by the government to make the promised measures, and instead followed procrastination politics, the tribal alliance renewed their protest, now in the form of Occupy Muthanga. The indigenous people of Wayanad, under the banner of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) – nearly 800 families – entered the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (MWWS) in January 2003 and declared the area their own, a new republic. However, in two months’ time, on 19 February, they were forcefully evacuated with armed police: one Adivasi and a police officer lost their lives; several Adivasis were hurt or injured in the process.

Mayilamma – the Dalit woman leader of the anti-Cola water movement in Plachimada – explicitly told this author: ‘I do not know whether it was due to globalization or not, what I know is that our wells are getting dried up; whatever little water left was polluted.’ This political statement came at a time when water has rapidly become a contested commodity worldwide, with local communities in many parts of the world suffering the threat of multinationals working in collusion with the state apparatus to usurp their precious natural resources, including in Plachimada.

There has been a recent proliferation of scholarship on water conflict and governance, both within and outside political landscapes, attempting to address the various nuances of global and local governance strategies. Increasing concern has been expressed regarding the widespread social and political-ecological implications of current and potential ‘water wars’ and water conflicts. Water supply, once considered a public utility or a service, is now fast becoming a marketable commodity, one that is to be sold on a full cost-recovery basis, an approach that is vehemently opposed by social agencies, which fight back, often as part of a wider struggle, but also within specific locales. Such movements throw into stark relief the ironies inherent in the discourse–counter-discourse (Grillo and Stirrat 1997; Terdiman 1985; Ashcroft 2001; Daudi 1983; Escobar 1985; Byrant and Baily 1997) generated as part of the process of conflict resolution. And now ‘governance’ as a conflict-resolution strategy wrought through the multiple agencies of a legislative, institutional, and regulatory framework promoting equitable access to and ecologically sustainable management of water resources appears to be the new polemics. This chapter critically engages with the multiple knowledge conflicts and the multiple agencies involved in the vexed question of water access, power, and community rights in Plachimada, a small hamlet in the Palakkad district of the south Indian state of Kerala.

Social movements by themselves are not merely sensitizers of the public, but have an important role to play in exposing the ever-increasing threats to marginalized communities in terms of their livelihood, culture, and ecology. The social agencies involved in these movements are also credited with exposing the untruth in claims made by scientific and expert knowledge in their reproduction of hegemonic power relations that gnaw away at the roots of community existence and the right to live.

Nehruvian developmentalism reigned supreme in newly independent India in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was against this backdrop that the Soviet-inspired Communist Party came to power in Kerala in 1957, a year after state formation, creating history as the first democratically elected communist government1 in the world. It epitomized a smooth transition to power for the communists, based on the premise of peaceful coexistence as legitimized by Khrushchev in post-Stalinist USSR. While Nehru found inspiration in the Soviet principles of socialism, E.M. Sankaran Namboodirippad, the first communist chief minister of Kerala, in turn, admitted to having borrowed Marxism from Nehru, along with which he would also have been persuaded to open up the newly formed Kerala to state-driven developmentalism. The industrial road was thus extended from Delhi to Kerala with the left government facilitating the entry of Indian capital, the Birlas, to the state by establishing the Gwalior Rayons Silk Manufacturing (Wvg.) Company Ltd, Mavoor, on the outskirts of Kozhikode, which soon became a hub of industrial activity with the company setting up a rayon factory that attracted a huge mass of industrial workers. With hundreds of thousands of jobs on offer, the factory provided fresh employment opportunities for the families in the region; however, the initial euphoria gave way to protests when the pollution of the Chaliyar River by factory effluents became evident, virtually destroying the livelihoods of large numbers of families and rendering the water unusable, eventually forcing the Birlas to leave the state. Although the company did shut down its factory, it left in its wake devastated bamboo forests and a state economy that had suffered heavy losses by supporting the business venture; their departure was thus welcomed by the public even though it meant the loss of livelihood for a huge number of workers.

Mapping Resources: Agreements after Agreements

Surveying and mapping were key instruments of colonialism that remained in use in state-driven development projects in collaboration with big capital, as in the case of bamboo resource mapping and indigenous livelihood in Nilambur-Waynad facilitating the territorial enclosure of resources for the Indian big bourgeoisie in Mavoor. The communist government appointed Sivarajan, the then assistant conservator of forests, to survey the availability of bamboo resources and also assist the state in establishing resource territorial borders for the proposed rayon pulp factory (see Sivarajan 1959).

In this chapter, we present the major market failures and behavioural anomalies that are relevant to analyse energy and climate issues from an economic point of view. We start with a discussion on positive and negative externalities; next we discuss the public goods and common resource problem, followed by a presentation of the principal–agent and information problems, and then we provide a summary of the role of lack of competition in energy and energy-related markets. An important aspect described in this chapter is the role of behavioural anomalies, such as bounded rationality and bounded willpower. At the end of the chapter, we describe the most important energy and climate policies as well as the concept of sustainable development that should guide policy design. We also discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

In this chapter, we first explain what energy economics is and what energy and climate policy mean. We then describe the advantages of energy for society, and the current energy systems and their environmental and economic problems. At the end of the chapter, we discuss the energy transition and the characteristics of the energy systems once the transition has taken place. In the discussions in this chapter, we make note of developing countries.

In this chapter, we first provide a general overview of energy and climate policy goals and their main instruments. We underline the common goals between energy and climate policy, as well as possible conflicts in objectives. In the next part, we illustrate monetary market-based instruments such as pollution taxes, product taxes, and energy taxes, as well as subsidies and pollution permit trading systems. We also discuss, using figures, the implications of behavioural anomalies on the effectiveness of these types of policy instruments. At the end of the chapter, we introduce non-monetary market-based instruments, giving some weight to nudges. At the end of the chapter, we discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

In this chapter, we discuss some important elements of the economics of energy efficiency. We start by illustrating the definition of energy efficiency from a microeconomic point of view and then describe the most important empirical methods to measure the energy efficiency of an economy, a region, a firm, or a household. Afterwards, we present how households can evaluate investments in energy efficiency. To this end, we introduce the concept of lifetime costs. A central discussion of this chapter is developed on the concept of energy efficiency gap, that is a situation in which economic agents don’t invest in the most energy-efficient solutions, although they may be the most beneficial. We then explain the barriers that give rise to the energy efficiency gap, paying special attention to behavioural anomalies, in particular bounded rationality and the role of energy-related financial literacy. At the end of the chapter, we also present the rebound effect and discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

In this chapter, we describe non-market-based instruments. We start with a discussion on standards, highlighting the difference between pollution and energy standards. We then describe direct control measures. In this chapter, as in the previous one, we provide an illustration of whether these instruments are cost-effective and efficient from an economic point of view. Also, we discuss the relation between the presence of behavioural anomalies and the effectiveness of non-market-oriented instruments. At the end of the chapter, we discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.