Browsing by Author "Oivo, Katariina"

This study inspects civil society participation in climate politics in India. It maps the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in climate change issues in the country and analyzes their climate political positions. Climate change as a burning theme is deservedly the topic of lively academic discussion, increasingly also in social sciences. Given India’s status as a main emerging country and leadership role among developing countries in international environmental negotiations, its official climate political position is well studied. But the civil society angle on climate change in the world’s largest democracy remains uncharted ground. Therefore, this thesis embarks on exploratory research, undertaking the task of examining both the concrete climate change work done by Indian CSOs as well as the arguments they advance, based on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 15 civil society actors. Previous studies have observed CSOs’ role as 'norm entrepreneurs' that advocate for certain ideas and values in environmental politics, drawing on the potential of the 'global civil society' for shaping a morally loaded world culture. Following this line of thought, the arguments brought forward by the interviewees are conceptualized as moral claims. Theoretical insight is provided by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. The research frame applies their justification theory and Thévenot’s sociology of engagements to the analysis of the interviews utilizing theory-bound content analysis. Thus, the thesis sets out to discover: 1. what do the CSOs do related to climate change, and 2. what are the main arguments they advance and how are these justified. The first result of this study is that CSOs in India are engaged mainly in five kinds of activities on climate change: awareness-raising, advocacy, research, mitigation and adaptation. While these action forms are not unique to the Indian context as such, they take special shapes in the country. The second main finding is an argumentative form named inspired justice environmentalism (IJE) prevailing among Indian CSOs working on climate change. The families of arguments that constitute IJE are: climate justice, democratic process, primacy of livelihoods, traditional human-nature relationship, and rejection of the climate change agenda. IJE evokes 'civic', 'domestic' and 'inspired' principles, and is juxtaposed to an 'industrial' effective planning perspective. The study argues that sets of historically formed structural and cultural factors help explain the prevalence of IJE. Rampant poverty, vulnerability to climate change, low per capita emissions, and India’s position in the world system, as well as Gandhian, leftist and anticolonial thought and nature mysticism are connected to the discursive tendency. The results signal that arguments and their abstract and material justifications reflect both concrete circumstances and the political context, as well as an urgent sense of fairness.