Between history and grassroots mobilisation: Reimagining practices of climate resilience in the rainfed agrarian environments of Maharashtra, India

Abstract

Climate resilience is central for rural development programs, where it entails a set of techno-managerial strategies to build the capacities of communities to withstand shocks. Separating climate risks (out there) from impacted societies (in here), resilience-building efforts are guided by simplified understandings of human-environments relations and their co-emergent dynamics. As a result, they ignore how agrarian environments materialise through sedimented socio-ecological processes shaping how vulnerability and resilience from prescribed solutions will be rearranged. Yet, while critical geographical research has provided timely critiques of these dynamics, we have been left with little material to imagine how resilience may be done otherwise. Informed by feminist theories of care as a hopeful mode of critique about alternative possibilities, this thesis advances scholarship on the politics of climate-resilient development by adding a generative touch to the debate. Approaching resilience as a multi-faceted process rather than a well-defined object, I bring science and technologies studies' understanding of realities as emergent through everyday doings to develop a new theoretical approach to resilience as a practice enacted within more-than-human assemblages. Taking the rainfed regions of Maharashtra as case study, I unfold empirically the processes whereby a specific understanding of resilience centred around irrigation emerged during colonial rule. I then trace the historico-geographical relations through which its assemblage of practices travelled to inform climate-resilient programs and the invisibilities they created. In my reconstructive effort, I engage with the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture (RRA) Network - a group mobilising to revalidate the knowledges and practices of Indian rainfed socio-ecologies - to reveal how they articulate an alternative vision for rainfed regions assembled around water in the form of rainfall and show the tools they mobilise to bring it into being. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and participant observations, I interact with Network's members and farmers at the centre of their mobilisation to show how resilience is a practice articulated from different locations, which include both sites of instituted power as well as resistance. In doing so, I bring the debate on climate-resilient development beyond well-rehearsed emphasis on its shortcomings. Instead, recognising how resilience works as a terrain where questions over what agrarian futures are possible and for whom emerge, I engage with its co-existing articulations and explore the tensions that surface through their encounter. The thesis argues that an emancipatory politics of resilience 'as multiple' is one that, steeped within history, sides with alternatives practices that carve spaces where invisibilised configurations can emerge and hopefully take hold. Going forward, critical climate research should work more closely with grassroots actors to expand those resilient futures we want to make possible.

Date of Award	17 Jul 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Caitlin Henry (Supervisor) & Stefan Bouzarovski (Supervisor)