Provides an original contribution to global debates by exploring the lived experiences of uncertainty among marginalised communities in South Asian mountains and by challenging conventional climate change policies.
This book draws on two years of collaborative research by the contributors focused on understanding the experiences of uncertainty for marginalised people living in South Asian Mountains. Collectively, the contributors think their way into the contemporary condition of selected South Asian Mountain contexts. Their insights are shaped by a deep familiarity with the region, as indigenous scholars or through prolonged living and scholarly engagement with it. This book makes four contributions. First, it emphasises that ‘uncertainty’ is characteristic of life and living under the sign of anthropogenic climate change. This notion of uncertainty is intertwined with a pervasive sense of uncontrollability. Uncertainty is also conceptually uncontrollable as it is experienced and articulated in diverse ways across multiple domains and contexts.
Second, our examination of uncertainty is situated within the South Asian Mountain regions, addressing the global frontier of climate change and the unique challenges these mountains face in relation to it. Third, we adopt methods and perspectives that incorporate indigenous and local experiences through the practice of story listening, which involves the collaborative gathering of narrative evidence that can complement other forms of evidence, including scientific data. Finally, we critically engage with and question current policy-making practices and frameworks, based on the recognition that the links between policy and uncertainty in mountain contexts have not received sufficient scrutiny.
This book brings together the variously embodied and emplaced stories of people, living in mountain areas in Nepal, Bhutan and India. These are presented through narratives and innovative conceptual engagement, complemented by art. It focuses on their lived experiences of uncertainty across a range of domains that make their lives precarious. Not only does the book make an original contribution in identifying mountain areas as harbingers of the effects of climate change but by drawing these stories into wider policy debates it challenges the science-led framing of climate change policy. In its insistence that the lived experience for poor people is about the uncertainty and uncontrollability, the book challenges normative climate change planning frameworks that frame the world in terms of risk, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. It also raises fundamental questions of climate justice that have scarcely been addressed in a context where it is now clear that mitigation actions by the West will not arrest, let alone reverse, the direction of climate change. All of this, in our view, makes this book an original contribution to global debates.
