Styles of decarbonization

ABSTRACT

What characterizes the relations amongst actors engaged in decarbonization? I posit that no single characteristic can satisfactorily explain the heterogeneous politics of reducing emissions and propose the concept of styles as the patterned ways in which actors relate to each other to decarbonize. Based on qualitative fieldwork, I compare two projects for a national policy mandating the use of low-carbon technologies – India’s Smart Cities Mission – and find variation in their styles. In Rajkot, local state, business, and policy elites with a variety of interests converged to impose decarbonization on a site used by herders as pasture. In Davanagere, local industry, workers, state bureaucrats, and experts independently bargained over a plan that accommodated livelihoods in a puffed rice manufacturing district. I theorize styles as a systematic heuristic to capture variation in the politics of reducing emissions and identify surprising coalitions for decarbonization.

KEYWORDS:

• Decarbonization
• urban climate action
• climate change
• governance
• political ecology
• climate justice
• global South

Acknowledgments

Thank you to those with constructive comments at the Centre for Policy Research Discussion Group in New Delhi, the 1st International Conference on Energy Research and Social Science in Sitges, the 9^th Annual Conference on India and Climate Change at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, the “How sustainable are India’s Smart Cities?” workshop at the Institut d’ etudes avancees de Paris, the EASST/4S Conference in 2020, the IPK Climate Doctoral Working Group, and the NYLON workshop at New York University where I presented parts of this paper. Thanks also to Chandni Singh for pointing to the implicit focus on “imposition” of decarbonization in my work. I conducted most of the fieldwork during my time at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, with the generous guidance of Radhika Khosla and Navroz K. Dubash. Preliminary fieldwork in Karnataka by the author used for this paper was part of a research project led by LSE Cities, London School of Economics. Finally, for comments on this version of the paper, I thank Malcolm Araos, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Colin Jerolmack, and Yasemin Torfilli.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research benefited from research funding by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation for fieldwork in Gujarat; [81045724];