Producing nationalized futures of climate change and science in India

ABSTRACT

The complex relationship between climate knowledge production and political action has long been discussed. Critical and post-colonial analyses have looked at how models, used to produce scientific projections of climatic shifts, produce novel concepts of territory by the nation-state. The production of novel political temporalities has largely been ignored, however. This chapter critically analyses and compares two climate reports produced by the Indian Government. These reports, the first climatology reports developed in India, represent two significant shifts in the State’s temporal imaginary of climate change and climate politics. First, the State, through these reports, temporally orients itself to the future (models of potential climates-to-be), rather than the past (attribution of historical responsibility to Northern states) as it had during the first half of international climate negotiations at the United Nations. Second, by focusing on the development of regional-specific models, the Indian government subtly continues to resist the imposition of a synchronized, global time of climate change, albeit through a nationalist framework. If the meaning of climate change is ultimately derived from a clash of competing temporalities between Global South and North, as well as between humanity and Nature, it speaks to the necessity of post-colonial scholars to engage directly with the meanings of the future in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• climate science
• temporality

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Laura Zanotti and Rohan Kalyan for their thoughtful guidance and feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Small island states and oil-producing states have long acted according to different temporalities of threat than the majority of other developing states.

2 By sidelining the issue of equity articulated in the Brazilian Proposal in favour of determining the methodologies and calculations that would gain acceptance by all state Parties of the UNFCCC. However, by COP 6 in 2000 at the Hague, little work had been done at the Subsidiary Body of Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) that could be reported back to the COP. Debates around the calculations continued through 2005, including around the need to incorporate all GHGs, not just carbon emissions, and the difficulty of accurate historical data prior to 1990 (Friman, 2008, pp. 24–25). The ‘technical twist’ away from the original political approach was an attempt to use a veneer of scientific knowledge in order to thwart the open contestation between parties of different interests and capacities, i.e. politics.

3 Though a 0.51°C rise may not seem very drastic, the danger unique to anthropogenic climate change is the speed with which the changes are occurring. As a matter of comparison, it took 7000 years for the average global temperature to rise 4–5°C between the end of the Pleistocene (the last ice age) 18,000 years ago and the onset of the Holocene, the geologic epoch in which sedentary agricultural societies first developed (IPCC, 1995).

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Anthony Szczurek

Anthony Szczurek teaches at Saddleback College. His research focuses on the intersection of political temporality and climate change.