Climate territories: A global soul for the global South?

Abstract

In this article, we depict climate as an issue which deterritorialises existing geopolitical realities in a manner which suits the discourses of both elite science and corporate globalisation. In this deterritorialisation, the politics of place, of difference, are removed; the divisions between North and South – the Minority and Majority Worlds – must melt away as all peoples become citizen- consumers in need of a morally conservative (using global archetypal myths of flood and fire) but economically neo-liberal global soul with which to confront the global nemesis of climate change. This deterritorialisation is constructed from a Northern (particularly a Western European) position. It emerges from post– material and post-industrial environmental discourses, largely ignoring the discourses and frames of post-colonial environmentalism (and environmental debt) which are far more appropriate when describing the environmental and developmental realities of the Global South. In the article, we introduce the case of India, as both its civil society and governments wrestle with the new realities of the global climate change agenda. We show how India’s official framing of climate change discourse, overwhelmingly dictated and driven by the imperatives of economic growth, continues to oscillate between the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of deterritorialised- global representations of climate change and the growing trends to reterritorialise multifaceted climate space through geopolitical- geoeconomic reasonings.