Sustainability Conflicts in Coastal India: Hazards, Changing Climate and Development Discourses in the Sundarbans (Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research)

This multidisciplinary work analyses challenges to sustainable development amidst rapidly changing climate in the world’s largest delta – the Sundarbans. Empirical evidence unpacks grounded vulnerabilities and reveals their temporal socio-economic impacts. A novel concept of __‘everyday disasters’__ is proposed – supported by data and photographic evidence – that contests institutional disaster definition. Then it uncovers how the geopolitics of ecological governance and its hegemonic discourse dominate local policies, which in turn fail to address local socio-ecological concerns, adaptation needs and development aspirations. Absence of local vocabularies, cognitive values and socio-cultural contexts along with spatially constricted, exclusionary, top-down techno-science approaches further escalate knowledge-action gaps. Deconstruction of multiscalar conflicts between the global rhetoric and transformative postcolonial geographies offers an ethical, Southern perspective of sustainability. Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 Warming World, Threatened Poor (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 3-33 Recipe of a Disaster: Peripheral Lives in the Epicentre of Changing Climate (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 35-66 Front Matter ....Pages 67-67 Dusting the Layers: Evolution of Vulnerabilities (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 69-84 Is Science Sacred? (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 85-125 Discursive Dissonance in Socioecological Theatre (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 127-179 ‘Are Comments Free’? Where ‘Consents Manufacture’ (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 181-213 Front Matter ....Pages 215-215 For the ‘Comfortably Numb’: Conclusion (Aditya Ghosh)....Pages 217-237 Back Matter ....Pages 239-245