Sustainability Conflicts in Coastal India

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.

Provides diverse empirical evidence on disaster risks, climate change adaptation, policy discourses and sustainability governance to deconstruct them. Analyses over 900 media reports, three-decade long socio-economic data and presents over 50 visuals from actual disaster situations Simulates actual socio-ecological scenarios of sustainable development and climate change adaptation, unpacking the entire breadth of entanglements spread across spatial scales, probably for the first time Identifies knowledge gaps, knowledge-actions gaps, barriers and synergies to sustainable development in the Global South. Constructs a framework to facilitate co-production of knowledge and reflexivity by hybridising the socio-cultural with the techno-scientific

Autorentext
Aditya Ghosh graduated with a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and has studied at the University of Sussex, University of Calcutta, University of Mumbai, and the University of Lincoln. Aditya specializes in sustainable development, climate change and socio-ecological systems.

Inhalt
Part I. 'Devil' in the deep blue sea?: 1. Warming world, threatened poor.- 2. Recipe of a disaster: Peripheral lives in the epicentre of changing climate.- Part II. Digging deep: Evidence and Empiricism: 3. Dusting the layers: Evolution of vulnerabilities.- 4. Is Science Sacred?.- 5. Discursive dissonance in socio-ecological theatre.- 6. Are comments free? Where consents manufacture.- Part III. Joining the Isles: 7. For the comfortably numb: Conclusion summary.- Postscript.- Reference.