Environmental Justice as an Alternative to Resilience: India as an Example

Abstract

The notion of resilience is being increasingly used, without much criticism, in various areas of the development debate, involving climate migration. Nevertheless, the concept incorporates several weaknesses which are often ignored: it is a vague and non-transparent concept with shifting meanings, transfers the risk and responsibility of adaptation from the state onto the shoulders of individuals, and duplicates existing injustices. Thus, it promotes the continuation of the status quo and overlooks the structural causes of socio-economic and environmental problems. This paper argues that resilience is a limited framework to deal with environmental harms and that environmental degradation should be dealt with in a framework of environmental justice because it provides a more comprehensive and just socio-ecological lens for the critical assessment and solution of environmental problems. The paper studies the phenomenon of climate migration in India and investigates why an environmental justice framework should be employed for analyzing and proposing solutions to environmental damage instead of resilience.