Rethinking ‘just transitions’ from coal: the dynamics of land and labour in anti-coal struggles

ABSTRACT

Communities resisting large coal mining projects navigate the significant tensions between imperatives of urgent climate action and economic growth in complex and contingent ways. Drawing on empirical research in a mining region of Central-Eastern India, this paper examines how the changing ‘agrarian’ context of rural livelihoods and household reproduction within mining-affected communities shapes the motivations of local anti-coal struggles, and the articulation of climate-change related concerns within them. It argues that such a conceptualization of political contestations over coal extraction points to crucial possibilities for building broader counter-hegemonic movements for more inclusive ‘just transitions’ away from coal.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-coal struggles
• climate justice
• just transitions
• agrarian change

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the forum editors, participants of the 3rd Annual Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism, and two anonymous reviewers for their patient support and detailed comments on the paper. Thanks especially to Jun Borras, Julien-François Gerber, Amrita Chhachhi, Shapan Adnan, Nadya Karimasari, Atakan Buke, Suravee Nayak, Babur Hussain, Bruna Figueiredo Gonçalves, Vikas Dubey, Bhoopendra Kumar, Yukari Sekine and Daniela Calmon who provided extremely helpful feedback on earlier drafts. This paper would not have been possible without the guidance and support of many friends in Tamnar who remain anonymous in the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Such plans also point to the increased global funding being made available for ‘just transitions’ away from coal as part of climate action efforts (see, for instance, CIF 2021). India’s recently announced project is similarly contingent on financial support from the World Bank.

2 There are important similarities to Shivji’s (2017) conceptualization of ‘working people’, which argues that under neoliberalism, capital expropriates not just surplus value from wage labour, but also part of the necessary consumption of small producers. While such an understanding is broadly consistent with Bernstein’s understanding of the growing challenges to simple reproduction of classes of labour, Shivji emphasizes the functional role of self-exploitation of the working population for contemporary capital accumulation.

3 Bernstein (2006, 456–457) himself takes a more ambivalent stance, arguing that contemporary political struggles of classes of labour – many of which centre around demands for land – are best understood as disparate and context-specific responses to their crises of reproduction, rather than earlier systematic class struggles.

4 Both authors do, however, caution that such resistance rarely indicates a conscious effort to withdraw from or reduce workers’ dependence on wage labour, nor does it highlight a broader trend towards ‘re-peasantization’. See, for instance, Moyo and Yeros (2005) for this latter perspective.

5 Shrivastava, Gupta Bhaya, and Worsdel (2020) highlight that there have been similarly widespread violations and subversion of consent provisions for large-scale land acquisitions across India.

6 This was an outcome of the private mine operator’s plans to not relocate inhabited areas of the affected villages, but to limit open-cast mining to agricultural and common lands and forests.

7 It is possible that some landless and marginal households migrated out from the village post-land acquisition and were not included in the present analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amod Shah

Amod Shah is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague, The Netherlands. He also supports the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) secretariat.