Decolonizing Climate Change through Ethnography: Labor as Method in Agrarian Worlds

Surabhi Pant, University at Buffalo
Raka Sen, Arizona State University

Climate change is a geographically variegated, historically rooted, and socially complex phenomenon. Yet dominant policy frameworks reduce this complexity to atmospheric carbon, technological transition, and governance at a planetary scale. By universalizing adaptation pathways premised on fully proletarianized labor, these frameworks obscure land-dependent livelihoods, agrarian differentiation, migration, and social reproductive burdens through which climate change is experienced across much of the Global South. This paper advances a relational approach that shifts the unit of analysis from climate impacts/policy regimes to relations of labor and their reorganization under ecological change. The paper draws on our comparative ethnographic research in two ecologically fragile regions: the Indian Himalayas and the Sundarbans delta spanning India and Bangladesh. In dominant climate discourse, these regions appear primarily as zones of vulnerability defined by extreme events, glacial floods, sea-level rise, and cyclones, and addressed through technocratic adaptation. Ethnographic attention to everyday labor, however, reveals a different story. Climate change becomes visible through shifting crop cycles, intensifying migration, restructured caste and gender hierarchies, and the expanding demands of social reproductive work. Recent scholarship in critical social sciences has brought climate change back to questions of land, labor, and development while calling for historically grounded epistemological plurality. Building on these insights, Pant's research in the Indian Himalayas demonstrates how ecological instability reorganizes and intensifies women’s labor sustaining agrarian ecosystems, while Sen's work in the Sundarbans shows how salinity intrusion reshapes cropping patterns, livelihoods, and everyday labor. Drawing on ecological Marxism and agrarian political economy, we argue that relations of labor constitute a critical methodological entry point through which climate change becomes knowable. Centering labor reveals climate change not as an abstract environmental crisis but as a lived restructuring of agrarian life, generating a decolonial methodological approach that relocates climate theory in the material worlds of the agrarian Global South.

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 Presented in Session 53. Energy, Climate Change, and the Immediacy of the Present