Description
The paper examines how borders have affected environmental politics in South Asia. It looks at three sites of environmental politics that straddle international borders in South Asia. Each is a transboundary resource or protected area: a river (the Brahmaputra), a forest (the Sundarbans), and a mountain (the Kailash region of the Himalayas). The paper argues that each represents a facet of environmental conflict that impinges on how the resource is framed and managed. In the case of the Brahmaputra, we encounter securitisation. Both India and China have relied on securitised water discourses to assert their user rights over the river. Hydronationalism is compounding the already weak institutional arrangements between the two states. In the Sundarbans, that lies astride Bangladesh and India, we come across militarisation. The mangrove forests have been the site of many partitions, and as part of state building, have witnessed brutal state action against inhabitants and their forcible eviction. Poaching and the criminalization of tiger-related human casualties is another dimension of militarised practices in the tiger reserve. Lastly, in the Kailash region, we witness sedentarisation. The mobility of the Tibetan nomads, the sole inhabitants of the core sacred area is seen by the state as an encroachment into protected areas that are part of the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation Initiative, of which China, Nepal and India are members. Tibetans fear that the conservation rhetoric justifies the state’s strategy to push for their sedentarisation. The paper argues how although transboundary resource management has largely conformed to statist interests, trans-territoriality is often a negotiated state of existence. The effectiveness of transboundary initiatives would depend on their ability to embrace ecological citizenship that encompass local communities, other species and future generations.
