Drought in Karnataka, India in 2012. Pushkarv/Wikimedia Commons.
With high levels of poverty and endemic food insecurity, agrarian regions of South Asia are often argued to be uniquely vulnerable to contemporary climate change. This has led to repeated calls for an urgent process of ‘climate change adaptation’ in which climatic threats can be mitigated and new opportunities seized. Although the need to adapt may seem self-evidently necessary, much of the current policy debate tends to gloss over a troubling facet of contemporary climatic change. Not only are different social groups unequally affected by climatic trends, but also the security of some social groups is often directly tied to the insecurity of others. This thorny issue is often not addressed in official discourse, yet it is particularly clear in agrarian environments in South Asia, where relationships of debt, dependency and forced labour are key mechanisms through which marginal groups experience climatic change.
Relational vulnerability
To grasp these social dynamics, we must focus on the ways in which subordinate groups are incorporated into what I term ‘relational vulnerability’—a situation in which the relative security of some and the relative vulnerability of others are directly linked and are reproduced over time.
