Sustainability Conflicts in Coastal India by Aditya Ghosh

Author:Aditya Ghosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.4.3 Governmentality of Risk Mitigation

This is why, when the federal and the local governments sanctioned and embarked upon the billion Euro Aila Bandh project, it left many local administrators deeply surprised. Because of socio-economic hindrances, along with its questionable technical efficacy, the Aila Bandh project remains an indefinite and justifiably procrastinated process. The futility of having disparate approaches to risks (production and adaptation) and development processes has been highlighted by Uitto and Shaw (2016: 3, 4). This study attempts to further our understanding about how governmentality of environmental governance escalated smaller, local, everyday weather events to the scale of ‘disasters’ that in turn threatened livelihoods and household level as well as biophysical aspects of sustainability. The everydayness of environmental changes and weather events needs to be discussed (Loftus 2012; Ingold 2011) more vigorously where the shorter cycles of interaction between physical weather events and governmentality of risk governance seem to aggravate socioecological setbacks. Events such as tidal bores, perigean spring tides, land subsidence, riverbank and coastal erosion and what ‘risk’ they represent for the local lives, that is, how ‘risky’ the communities perceive them, become important. The question of subjectivity must be dealt with to define the risks, which can have discriminatory effects on differently spatially aligned communities across physical spaces (Müller-Mahn and Everts 2013: 206), which in Sundarbans manifests in greater impact for marginal who live close to the coasts and riverbanks.

A variety of physical phenomena, originating in the natural domain, become threats because of biopolitical technology of risk governance (Oels 2013). This also shifts the emphasis on the individual and community adaptability (Joseph 2013). Thus, extricating ‘resilience ’ and ‘sustainability’ from the exclusive control of the biopolitical technologies and anglophone conceptualisations – representing the neoliberal forms of governmentality – becomes an important task. The Sundarbans serves as a perfect example – the embankment project has successfully shifted the responsibility of the state to physically protect people from the people themselves. This drift between scientific discourses and everyday experiences, a top-down approach of the epistemic scientific and bureaucratic communities who pretend to ‘speak truth to power ’ (Krauss and von Storch 2012), suggests that the mantle of ‘rationality’ now rests with the community at large rather than with those once conceived as ‘the authorities’ (Healey 2011). Such processes substantially undermine the larger understanding of resilience and sustainability across socioecological systems concerned with the long-term survival of populations, species and ecosystem. Instead, they merely come to imply preservation of day-to-day activities of individuals and communities.

Central to Foucauldian thought, particular forms of conduct could be accomplished through shaping the self and subject positions (Paterson and Stripple 2014), which means that a government works through people’s governing of certain forms of disaster and flood management instruments over others. The people’s governance may also extend discursively in the form of legitimising and reinforcing such structures. While accepting the need for embankments in shorter policy horizon, it is felt by groups of scientists that the trade-off in spending such a colossal sums to achieve

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