Reimagining Climate Justice as Caste Justice

Abstract

The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.We see this acknowledgement in the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibility' formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would

The Implementation of Sustainable Development to Achieve Climate Justice: Indonesian Perspective as an Archipelagic State

“…Providing a good environment and sustainably managing natural resources for the nation's welfare is the mandate of the 1945 Constitution. In particular, the mandate is emphasized in the Article 28H of the Constitution that every Indonesian citizen has the right to a decent environment (Scorecard, 2022). Accordingly, article 33 Indonesian Constitution also emphasizes that Indonesia's land and natural resources must be sustainably managed by the government for the prosperity of the people.…”