In recent years, as extreme weather has become the new normal, so have the processes of coloniality, erasure, and state violence that wring climate into shape for their ends. In South Asian cities, we see these processes playing out in the form of evictions and displacements at the hands of sustainability-sanctioned land-grabs; crackdowns and arrests of climate activists and farmers along caste-ist, racialized, and ethnic lines; new forms of climate vulnerability for gig-workers to domestic workers; and more.

Recognizing these concerns, SAUC’s 2026 panel aimed to elicit discussion about and across the historic and geographic specificities that shape how projects of development, extraction, and climate-making materialize, and the place-making practices that might otherwise fall away. Further, and in thinking beyond binaries of despair and hope, what kinds of artistic, coalitional, activist, and other practices and imaginaries might reorient us towards more ecological futures. In setting up this dialogic space, our hope was to draw attention to specific sites, as well as to generate discussion and trace connections across sites and practices.

Govindarajan looked from Tuticorin to consider how sustainability discourses are operationalized to rework associations with toxic industrial sites, how people live with memories and sites of contamination, and the messy landscape of protests. Jogesh focused on the terrain of climate policy to articulate how ecology and weather have been co-opted into financial institutions and credit schemes, and looks from a distinctly urban lens to rework rural finance. Nahreen turned our attention to fluvial memories in Dhaka, providing a historical reading of its urban ecologies, reading against the colonial archive to trace how a river city became a groundwater city. Chatti focused on questions of science and technology to consider how knowledge about energy and climate is produced, how it travels, and brought to the fore rural-urban dynamics. Ghertner’s work looked at flooding in Goa to draw out caste-based politics and provincial practices of climate feudalism that reproduces colonial dynamics.

Across several of the presentations, there was a focus on ecological instabilities and crises, how it is formulated, efforts to stabilize the same, and their contradictory outcomes. We discussed the place of technological and technocratic fixes, financializing of climate, and nature-based solutions that often perpetuate existing inequalities. Within this realm, there was attention to colonial histories and its ongoing reproduction through caste and feudal logics. The panel helped bring into dialogue urban sites at a range of scales into dialogue with one another to consider climate changing projects in South Asia. 

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