Abstract
When large-scale land investments and natural resource-oriented climate change mitigation and adaptation politics overlap with and reshape one another, the socio-economic and political intersections that occur can be socially and politically explosive. Where and when this happens, ordinary villagers are being squeezed out between land concessions and climate change mitigation and conservation initiatives, justified partly and facilitated by the narrative that villagers’ customary way of life and production systems are either ecologically destructive or economically inefficient, or both.
The intersection occurs in a four-way conflict cocktail: old and new conflicts in climate change mitigation initiatives and land grabbing. Tackling and transforming the four-way entanglement of conflicts is difficult, politically, in less-than-democratic settings. In turn, this becomes quite daunting to address when accompanied by multiple social fault-lines of ethnicity, class, gender and generation.
Having a fuller understanding of political and policy tensions, and taking a stand that confronts rather than backs away from these tensions, is the only way we can understand and harness political synergies that are required in addressing simultaneously the twin challenge of agrarian justice and climate justice.