Reframing Socio–environmental Relations in Coastal Mumbai and Kutch, India

In this article, we explore how local livelihoods and socio–environmental relations can be reframed through co-productive knowledge practices and legal activism. We start by tracing the emergence of colonial declensionist views of environments in India as ‘productive’ and ‘normal’, which have powerfully shaped visions of environments and socio–environmental relations in contemporary times, marking certain landscapes ‘marginal’ or ‘unproductive’. The emergence of environmental legislation, particularly the Coastal Regulation Zone, sought to promote a vision of nature and coastal ecologies and communities as having intrinsic value. Yet, contestations around these spaces have been intense and the knowledges and practices of artisanal fisherfolk and pastoralists remain invisible and devalued in official policy discourses. In order to shine a light on how people living in these environments are perceived and governed, and how engagement of co-production and reframing has helped challenge existing power relations, we focus on two communities in India, the artisanal fisher people, Kolis, of Mumbai and the Maldharis, traditional camel herders in Kutch, Gujarat. We draw attention to how the often ignored perspectives of local people can be made more visible through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, visual and participatory methods of mapping socio-ecological relations, engaging in co-production of knowledge that can help challenge some of the prevailing dominant framings of landscapes as ‘marginal’ and local communities as ‘destructive’. Reframing socio–environmental relations through co-producing knowledge has the scope to reverse the modernist and globalising instinct that colonises land, livelihoods and the commons, and strengthen the agency and voice of local communities.