Decolonizing Climate Discourse: Embracing Plurality in Knowledges

Atmospheric Tales: Season 5 / Episode 4

Rithodhi Chakraborty (Guest), Uma Pal (Interviewer), Shahzad Gani (Host)

[Music]

Shahzad G: Welcome to Atmospheric Tales, a podcast that amplifies stories and experiences related to air pollution and climate change, from around the world.

[Music]

Shahzad G: I’m your host, Shahzad Gani, and welcome to another episode of Atmospheric Tales.

Our guest today is Dr Ritodhi Chakraborty, a political ecologist and interdisciplinary social scientist who collaborates with indigenous and agrarian communities to explore pathways of environmental and social justice. For the past 15 years, he has worked with various universities, think-tanks, public and civil society institutions in United States, India, Bhutan, China and Aotearoa/New Zealand on issues of plural knowledges, environmental and social justice, rural transformation, youth subjectivities, climate change and agriculture.

Our interviewer today is Uma Pal, a Senior Analyst at the Climate Policy Initiative, India. Her work focuses on adaptation, resilience and sustainable finance. With over 8 years of experience in the climate and development space, her expertise lies in climate change policy and institutional analysis, physical climate risk assessments and mainstreaming climate risk in plans, policies, and actions of governments and the private sector. Uma holds a Master’s degree in Climate Change and Sustainability Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, and a Bachelor’s degree in Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University.

Welcome to the show, Ritodhi and Uma!

Uma P: Thanks Shahzad, and welcome Ritodhi; looking forward to this conversation.

Ritodhi P: Thanks so much, Uma; it’s a real pleasure to be here with you, today, on this podcast.

Uma P: We are at the brink of a polycrisis, and the worsening impacts of climate change across all spheres of human and natural systems call for urgent action. While no region is immune to the impacts of climate change, the consequences differ across populations, even within relatively small geographies, due to various socio-economic, political, environmental, and geographical factors. The interplay of existing vulnerabilities, structures of power, unsustainable infrastructure, and the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme events and disasters may very well lead to widespread systems failure sooner than anticipated. Dominant discourses of climate science drive climate planning and action, and yet the climate problem, at its core, is a deeply political and social one. The global politics of climate change is entrenched in, but not limited to, the North-South divide and the process of knowledge production is intrinsic to the global North-driven systemic bias. Ritodhi, your research scrutinizes the epistemic and ontological basis of normative climate science and policy and highlights the imperative for plurality in knowledge generation to tackle climate injustice. In this context, and to explore this topic more deeply, I would like to ask you a few broad questions around how diverse bodies of indigenous knowledge play a crucial role in enabling transformational climate action, and how they can be best represented in mainstream approaches to climate action.

Ritodhi, your paper ‘From climate adaptation to climate justice: Critical reflections on the IPCC and Himalayan climate knowledges’ emphasizes that climate change is a matter of justice and equity. The narrative stitches together deeply personal stories and perceptions about development and climate change, and the institutional knowledge and policymaking processes that often fail to incorporate these voices. In this context, could you talk about the theory of environmental degradation, and how it has been detrimental to resilience building in the highly climate-sensitive difficult terrain of the Himalayas?

Ritodhi C: Thank you, Uma, this is a great question. But it is, you know, it’s always telling. The question itself is somewhat problematic, right? Because even the words we use to describe certain parts of the world, they remain really entrenched in some mainstream ideas of what a place is like, right? So, we often talk about the Himalaya as having, like you said, difficult terrain or it’s climate sensitive, right? And again, the question becomes, it is more difficult as compared to what? As compared to Maharashtra, as compared to our Aravallis, as compared to the Bengal Delta. And similarly, with this highly climate sensitive, right? So, part of this notion of this theory of Himalayan environmental degradation, it comes from this exoticisation, this hyper specialization of the Himalaya, as this really, some would say, exceptional place. That exceptional place is both fragile as well as dangerous. It’s both a place that can’t really be understood, but it’s also a place that needs to be protected. It’s also a place that’s off the map. That’s where dragons live, right? It’s a part of the world that we don’t understand. And this kind of thinking really drove a lot of understandings around how we engaged with the Himalaya, both from a domestic perspective of, let’s say, the Indian state, but also from a colonial perspective, right, the way in which colonial administrators thought about the region. So, theory of environmental degradation really kind of pushed forward on this platform of environmental determinism, right? So, environmental determinism is this really insidious way of looking at the world where we say that human culture or the way that people are is a direct response to the environment where they live. Now, this kind of thinking was part of the reason why, let’s say colonizers or elite folk, they kind of created these myths about the world. You know, the tropical people, they’re just lazy; they just like to nap in the afternoon kind of stuff. And it’s because it’s really hot and people get sweaty, so they take a nap. And this kind of thinking, you know, then becomes essentialism, which is when we reduce the diversity or the complexity of a whole socio-ecological system to a few stereotypes, and they’re often stereotypes which help push a certain narrative which again helps the people that are in power. So, theory of Himalayan environmental degradation in very simple terms said that Himalayan farmers, especially small farmers in Nepal, they don’t really know how to take care of their mountains, therefore there is incredible erosion, therefore we need development interventions, we need elite technocratic interventions to help them, so that they can more sustainably harvest, farm, what have you, right? So in a sense, you know, locals are stupid. We should tell them how to manage their own resource, manage their own land. So, you know, the Himalaya itself has been and continues to be a place where the voice of folks on the ground, right? There is a massive diversity of voices on the ground, right? It’s a huge. millions of people live there. There’s varieties of kinds of people who live there. There are certain voices, of course, that end up coming to the top, but then there’s lots of others that remain silent. And it continues to be a place where there is hyper extractivism being practiced through mining, hydropower, what have you. But it’s also a place where there is a lot of epistemic silence, right? So, when it comes to representation within the way we think about knowledge production, you know, in whatever space you may think of — in textbooks, in, you know, in IPCC, in even governmental scientific discussions, they are very much absent. So again, sorry for this long, let’s say, opening salvo, but part of the problem about writing about the Himalaya is to begin first with dismantling this very extractive, this very paternalistic, this very, I would call it relational, in many ways a hegemonic relational apparatus that we have in place through which we look at this truth.

Uma P: Thanks Ritodhi, that was super enlightening and a really good way to start the conversation, and also, just to put in context, the fact that it’s not just the Himalayas, but every indigenous community and regions which are difficult to penetrate, supposedly, by mainstream development interventions and people, are perceived to be in need of help, right, and you know, it seems like the white man’s burden continues to be carried on in very different ways, and entrenched in like, development interventions even domestically. This leads me to my next question, which is around resilience building and development, or rather, technocratic top-down notions of development, which try to immediately respond to issues through processes and systems that do not really take the context into account. But, it also looks at communities who have priorities and needs which are socioeconomic in nature, or are to do with inequities or inequalities that people have been facing for generations, and that you also talk about in your paper. Resilience is often pitched against development, because resilience measures have longer time horizons, might require for development to happen differently and maybe are perceived as more resource-intensive. What role can indigenous knowledge play in integrating resilience measures in development? How can the people who will be active participants of this development understand the importance of resilience, or maybe they do already, and take it forward from there?

Ritodhi C: Yeah, again, thank you. That is a good question. Again, you know, terminology is something I get stuck in on. All of these terms, right, like indigenous, resilience — they have their own genealogy, right? They emerge from a certain lattice, which, let’s say, pays homage to a certain kind of thinking. You know, it’s like saying, you know, there’s this proverb that I’ve heard before and I don’t know where it’s from, but it says, when the only tool in your box is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And, part of it is that, right? Resilience emerges from ecosystem theory and ecological sciences. And this is something, you know, we see a lot in, I would say, even within transdisciplinary knowledge spaces, right? This imposition of natural science, physical science metaphors on the social, cultural, political systems; and this is something very problematic. With natural science metaphor, let’s say resilience research looks at systems dynamics of, I don’t know, vegetational indexes or is looking at how, you know, a small niche is reacting to long-term seasonal variations in temperature. And then we take a concept like that and then we overlay that onto a social, cultural, political situation, which in many ways can’t quite be captured by a natural science metaphor like that, right? Yet, this is, you know, another example that shows you the problematic hierarchies of knowledge that still exist in the world, where a lot of our default definitions about the way we understand the world are still under rooted in natural and physical science metaphors, which are drawing upon a certain way of understanding the world, right, because these metaphors are not just floating, they are standing on foundations of natural and physical science, which in many ways fail to understand the way, you know, relationality works, the way intersectionality works, the way, let’s say, power circulates through social, cultural, political spaces, right. So, having said that, now let me talk to you about the more problematic word, which is indigenous, right. Now, if we were talking about a settler colony, right, if we were talking about the United States, or if we’re talking about Australia, then there is, you know, different ways of demarcating who is indigenous and who is not, right? Now, this gets a lot more different the moment you enter the Indian context, right? And I would say, you know, the special issue put out by Malini Rangathan and Mabel Gergan, which looks at racialization in India, as well as a lot of work that’s now being done, often by scholars from the NorthEast, really tries to tease apart the, let’s say, the value of using a frame like indigenous knowledge or indigeneity within the Indian context. Because, let’s say, one way of describing what is indigenous knowledge can mean, well, it is the knowledge of communities who are marginalized within the mainstream, right? So, it’s people who are seen as less than equal to this mainstream vision of who is a civilized, who is a worthy person. Is that one way of thinking about indigeneity? Maybe. Another way of thinking about indigeneity could be that it is communities who for a longer period of time have practiced a certain kind of relationship with the more-than-human world, right? Now that relationship may or may not have connections to the more mainstream world; however, their version of that relationship is, in many ways, quite different. The problem then becomes what is indigenous knowledge. Is indigenous knowledge what is being practiced in IIT Delhi? Is indigenous knowledge, you know, what we see in the Jantar Mantar? Is indigenous knowledge what we are seeing in Ziro valley? So, it kind of becomes sort of problematic when we are trying to demarcate knowledge, right, in that way. However, I’m sorry I’ve kind of gone off on a little tangent here, but I think it’s important that your listeners understand that these concepts, they’re not decided, right? like their usage or their understanding in a way which is just and meaningful is not being democratic at this present moment, right? So, this question, right, what role can indigenous knowledge play in integrating resilience measures? I’m not sure I completely followed that resilience and development are really that different. I mean, part of my, let’s say, question would be why aren’t we using maybe a measure like well-being instead of resilience? Well-being, which is maybe emerging from more relational, let’s say, less kind of ecological science perspective, but more driven from a more holistic package of variables about what creates a healthy community, what creates a healthy social ecological relationship. One question is that, right, do we need to, does indigenous knowledge, should it even try to integrate resilience measures and development, right? That’s point one. Point two is that, you know, one of the problems of integrating anything is that if before we integrate, we don’t equalize the power relationship, right, so if there’s a hierarchy and we integrate two things which are not similar, then the more powerful one will always dominate. And this is why I am not a huge proponent of pushing for “indigenous knowledge” — you know, within quotations, I’m putting it here now — inside a lot of mainstream climate science, right? A lot of mainstream climate science and a lot of mainstream measures of development are not power neutral. There is this hierarchy where, let’s say, a consultant comes in, where quantitative ideas are seen as being more valid or more real than qualitative ideas, where certain notions of who is a more valid knowledge producer still reign supreme. If we have a system like that, and then we take what I see as knowledges that are often marginalized, and we put them in that system and say, now let’s integrate, chances are, and this happens all the time, that that more powerful, more dominant knowledge system is going to break, domesticate, and corral and kind of create a version of that knowledge, you know, that knowledge system that has now entered within the system to suit its own purpose, right? And that’s why you get things like brownwashing, you get things like tokenistic knowledge inclusion in these big development projects. So then, like I said, right, the first thing we need to do before we would integrate anything is to actually see how we can create an equitable framework within which integration can actually hold. And so, therefore, I feel one of the biggest roles that indigenous knowledge can play is to provide frameworks that allow for more empathetic, that allow for more collaborative, that allow for less competitive ways of knowledge systems to come together, right? And these kinds of moments of synergy or moments of synthesis, can lead to measures of development, which are actually a lot more holistic, and they actually are a lot more inclusive.

Uma P: This just takes me to my next question, which you have already spoken about, which is around attribution. Science is uncomfortable with uncertainty. The obsession with ‘attribution’ in the climate space seems to stem from the need to fine-tune climate models, but also to categorize resilience and adaptation action. So, multilateral institutions, especially development banks, have created structures, processes and metrics which allow for climate finance flows based on very narrow climate risk-informed assessments. What needs to be done then, to move towards and streamline more subjective and qualitative approaches to financing and implementing climate policies and action?

Ritodhi C: Yeah, you know, this is a, again, this is a great question. And again, I am not sure that we should be doing that. Part of why a lot of the more, I would say, the more successful, the more radical, the more inclusive movements to live with this new emerging climate-society relationship, is primarily because they have not been hijacked in many ways by these top-down multilateral institutions, these development banks, as well as by, you know, these, what do you call, the narrow climate risk assessments, right? And you know, Maria Tengö, who is one of the authors of the IPBES reports, she has this really amazing knowledge plurality graphic, right, where she shows the parallel existence of multiple forms of knowledge, right? I am a firm believer, again, going back to what I was saying earlier, of not kind of trying to create, I would say moments of triangulation, or moments of coming together between more powerful and less powerful institutions and communities, because there is that constant fear of that hijack happening. So what I would say is, the first thing we need to do here is, let’s say there’s three things we need to do. The first thing is that there needs to be a lot more on data justice within climate modeling, right? I mean, there’s that really famous book that was written at this point like 10 years ago, The Social Life of Climate Change Models, and you know, in that, Mike Hulme has this very interesting essay, right, about how climate models gain and exercise authority. And even though you kind of see how there is this process of breaking down and generalizing and creating this perfect subject, this perfect community or this perfect system, which then sort of moves through more statistical downscaling to couple with other models, which are also putting similar kinds of, let’s say, ways of breaking down reality; so, one of the things to understand is how do we build an ethnographic climate change model? What does that even mean? How do we build a climate change model where where the outputs of downscaling or the outputs of statistical measurements, right, are not treated as some kind of definitive point, but are seen as points on a spectrum? Now, what ends up happening is if I suggest something like this to the climate science community, they would say, well, if you say something like this, you are just going to give ammunitions to the science deniers, right? And of course, I would say, science imperialist way of thinking about climate science has, in a sense, created this kind of algorithmic hegemony. We have basically outsourced our truth-telling, the way we are understanding climate change, we’ve outsourced it to algorithms. And whoever controls those algorithms, you know, which more and more and more are large tech companies, right, like Google or Microsoft, but they’re massive AI platforms, right? And Eric Nost writes about this really well in his paper called Earth for AI, where more and more of these, you know, really hyper-dense data layers are coming in, data which itself, I’m not sure if it’s ethical, you know, ethical and audit and kind of regulation wrapped around it. You know, it could be people’s data which we shouldn’t have access to. And so, now that we are trying to handover to algorithms, in many ways the task of being our storytellers, it has become a really problematic thing, right? Because those algorithms then are really trained not to pick up on power. They are trained to not pick up on the way that difference works or the way that intersectionality works or the way that relationships work or the way that the global political system works. So, step one is how do we build ethnographic climate change models and why aren’t we doing more to focus on that instead of taking one regional climate model and then basically reproducing by populating it with, you know, supposedly contextual, mostly ecological and, you know, physical atmospheric data. Point two is that we need really, really strong regulatory and audit systems; so we need assessment systems for the way in which we actually assess things, right? So these narrow climate risk assessments, they serve a purpose, right? They didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. The insurance industry is making billions of dollars, you know, off the backs of such risk assessments. And if we have this kind of unholy alliance of big capital and big data, then we really need watchdogs. We need ways of reining in this kind of, what seems to me as, you know, this absolute rampage of risk, which is now being thrown at in communities, right? Because if we can turn the world into a risky place, then you can sell a lot of insurance. Also, if the world is a risky place and we are constantly in a state of war, then we can essentially disband civil rights, right? Because during crisis, that’s when democracy suffers the most. So, yes, I would say, like, I’m going to move on now, but yeah, there needs to be a lot of work done on sort of creating these regulatory mechanisms.

Uma P: This takes me to my next question, Ritodhi, which takes the conversation back to the Indian context. Where do you think multiplicity sits in India’s climate governance space, from the national, subnational, and local lens? Experiences from planning for SDGs and developing frameworks for monitoring and evaluation indicate the difficulty in using common frameworks for planning, implementing, and evaluating development action. How do you think these processes can move away from techno-managerial expert-driven and conceptually reductionist approaches, but retain accountability in the process?

Ritodhi C: Thanks for that question, Uma. Now again, this is a million dollar question and I feel there is, you know, 20 different ways of addressing this. So part one is that one of the things which is interesting and I don’t think this is unique to India, right, is that each scale that you talk about, national, sub-national, or local, they have very different agenda, right? Many of these state climate action plans that were made often with the help of, you know, big development consultants like GIZ or Swiss Aid or UNDP or what have you, and they were kind of literally, you know, they just took sustainable development or they took development rhetoric and they took development thinking and they essentially created a development plan. And then they said, well, hopefully someone is going to finance it. But most of these state action plans remain completely unfinanced, right, because the goal there was to show that, you know, we are climate ready, right? So, there’s a lot of bias. This is something that you see when Camelia Dewan writes about people sprinkling climate change like a spice. So people sprinkled a bit of the masala of climate change onto these big undertakings, and then the point was that, look, there’s a lot of development money right now being given, dollars flowing towards climate assessments; so let’s just access that and let’s just create these, right? At the national level, you see a lot of questions around folks saying that, well, India and China shouldn’t really be lumped with the Global South. And then India is saying, well, our emissions are never going to match those of the Global North; you guys are light years ahead. And then there’s other questions that are being asked about, are the elite, the industries within our nation hiding behind the emissions of the poor? And truth be told, these questions have been around about other things such as development or population and what have you, for quite a long time, ever since I would say the creation of the post-WW II world that we now have. But, you know, one of the things that kind of really stands out to me, is that there is the plurality within the Indian context, so I’m going call this not the climate space, but I’m going to call it climate-society relationships. You know, what you see is that at the local level, climate-society relationships are being engaged with in a very different way, the state in a very different way, national level a very different way, because often at the national level, you’re looking to the international scale and you’re trying to engage with those stakeholders. But for example, my work in the Himalayas, right, when I’m working in Uttarakhand, so one of the things that I’m doing right now is my project which is called the Himalayan Manthropocene, right? So, I’m looking at how patriarchy in many ways is driving the, not just the creation of climate knowledge, but the gatekeeping of how such kinds of knowledge ends up in the more political space. So, my point that, you know, this notion that this techno-managerial expert-driven, conceptually reductionist approach that’s there; yes, it is there and it will always be there, because we have this development state which is driven by industrial thinking. We have STEM which is much more powerful than other critical ways of thinking, and we have a deeply, let’s say, colonial world where certain kinds of knowledge are seen as being more valid. So the way to move away from this, actually, like I said, in many ways, is to allow many of these local initiatives to do what they’re doing, right? Yes, there are really problematic things happening at the local scale as well, that are casteist, that are sexist, that are, you know, ethno-nationalist, there’s a lot of religious othering happening; and those things end up having a massive effect on the kind of projects and the kind of solutions that we come up with, right? But the plurality is there. The plurality requires to be assessed, not through one standard metric. And I feel that’s what we need to do, is to look at our adaptation or mitigation successes at the local scale through assessment metrics that make sense to that scale.

Uma P: Thank you, and finally, I’ll move to my last question, which is perhaps a more personal one, Ritodhi, around how you approach your research and where you see yourself in the climate space, or rather, as you say, climate-society relationship. The burden of the anthropologist/ ethnographer lies in the realization that they are an intrinsic part of the documentation and storytelling process and yet are an outsider in so many ways. Have you had to grapple with these questions during your grassroots work, and would you have any tips to share with researchers in the field?

Ritodhi C: Yes, thank you. Again, this is a very, I feel this is a complicated question to answer. But first thing I’ll say about positionality, right? I worked in lots of parts of India, where, I mean all of India is very casteist, and so I worked in spaces in Uttarakhand for example where my caste profile, the way I sound, the way I look has allowed me unprecedented access right into people’s homes, into communities which if you were for a certain religion, if you were for certain caste that would be close to impossible, right? The fact that I’m a het-cis man also has empowered me in exactly those ways, right? That’s a privilege which has allowed me to do a certain kind of research which a lot of other people may not have been able to, right? You know, to tell you the truth, this question about studying the climate; still today, I’m not that interested in studying climate change, right? My main issue actually is in studying the ways in which climate change or the knowledge production around climate change, the politics of climate change is seeking to obfuscate the underlying structural issues, which are actually the reason why we have those issues, right? So that’s the reason why I’m still in this space. And I would say, I mean, for example, because I did my dissertation on masculinity, right, on studying rural men and the ways in which that generational changes are happening and how that has an impact on the way we relate to land, the way we relate to ownership, the way we relate to the state, to you know all of that. So, my point is that if you are trying to study climate change or climate society relationships right now in India, what you should really be studying is power. What you should really be studying is how communities at whatever scale you want to study them are reorienting themselves, are engaging with these broader historical structural processes, right? And always, you know, know that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. So, that notion, that really powerful idea of feminist epistemology is right, of feminist ethics, which allows us to treat our, you know, folks that we meet in the field, not just as test subjects from whom we are going to extract knowledge — which is something that happens often with Indigenous and rural communities in India — but as co-producers or as co-workers. Or as, you know, let’s say at the end of the day, you should be really sure when you’re in the field or you’re doing research, what is your end goal? Is your end goal a publication in Nature or is your end goal some kind of a livelihood? Or is your end goal understanding how we can support the ongoing work happening on the ground, let’s say, within marginalized communities to address not just climate change, but everything else, right, everything else from casteism to capitalism to the state to sexism, all of it together, right? Because people don’t just address one thing; they are pushing back against all of these forces that on a daily basis are trying to rob them of not just their land and not just their lives, but also of their dignity. So part of it is that like your ethics as a researcher should be to, you know, those communities much, much before it is to some scientific ideal.

Uma P: Thank you, Ritodhi; that was a wonderful, enlightening conversation!

Ritodhi C: Thank you!

Shahzad G: With that, I would like to thank our guest Dr Ritodhi Chakraborty, and our interviewer Uma Pal, for joining us on this episode of Atmospheric Tales. Thanks to all our listeners for tuning in — make sure to subscribe, and share!