Regional Political Ecologies and Environmental Conflicts in India

This book focuses on the regional political ecologies (RPEs) of environmental conflicts in India. It explores broadly, 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.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Understanding Regional Political Framings of Environmental Conflicts in India Sarmistha Pattanaik and Amrita Sen Chapter 2: Heritage or Basic Human Rights? Politics of Environmentalism Surrounding the Adi Ganga in Kolkata Jenia Mukherjee, Shreyashi Bhattacharya and Lina Bose Chapter 3: The Opportunities and Challenges of Transboundary Conservation: Solutions in Adaptive Management Radhika Bhargava Chapter 4: Riverbank Erosion and Inter-Community Relationships in Majuli: Political Implications of a Changing Landscape in Assam Avijit Sahay Chapter 5: A Regional Political Ecology of the Changing Cityscape and the Crisis of Conservation of the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW), India Sana Huque Chapter 6: Land Ownership and Ecological Knowledge Production from a Gender and Power Dynamics Perspective in a Village in Nagaland A. Wati Walling Chapter 7: Political Ecology of Natural Resource Governance in Chhattisgarh, India: Critical Ethnographic Reflections on the Vulnerable Livelihoods of the Scheduled Tribes in Bastar Janmejaya Mishra

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.