Patrik Oskarsson

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences | SLU · Department of Urban and Rural Development

Landlock: Paralysing Dispute over Minerals on Adivasi Land in India explores the ways in which political controversy over a bauxite mining and refining project on constitutionally protected tribal lands in Andhra Pradesh descended into a state of paralysis where no productive outcome was possible. Long-running support for Adivasi (or tribal) land r...

Indian companies - both state- and privately-owned enterprises - have gradually begun to invest in extractive industries beyond the boundaries of the country in recent decades. Yet, little is known about them. This article traces how domestic political-economic conditions shape the ways in which India's emerging multinational companies operate abro...

This article explores a great contradiction in rural land debates in India: on the one hand, explosive political contestation that is often able to halt proposed land acquisition; on the other, an unprecedented urban‐industrial expansion that is appropriating rural land. The authors argue that land grabbing for mining proceeds in an incremental man...

The advance of renewable energy around the world has kindled hopes that coal-based energy is on the way out. Recent data, however, make it clear that growing coal consumption in India coupled with its continued use in China keeps coal-based energy at 40 percent of the world’s heat and power generation. To address the consolidation of coal-based pow...

Coal in India carries different values and meanings for different actors. Consequently, the politics of this resource is manifested in multiple forms at multiple levels. Whereas the extraction of coal is accomplished by a larger resource politics involving an energy crisis narrative and a need to ensure national resource security, people at the gra...

This article asks what it is like for the rural poor to live with coal over time as mines expand and agriculture and forest-dependent ways of living inevitably become more restricted. Research on the expansion of open pit coal mining in India shows a widespread inability to appropriately compensate the rural poor for lost land and access to common...

This article explores how domestic NGOs responded to new opportunities that emerged during the 2015–2020 ‘modern slavery’ labour reforms in Thailand's seafood sector. The analysis takes place against the background of civil society transitions in a ‘post‐aid’ setting. Like NGOs in other middle‐income countries, the Thai NGO sector has struggled to...

Despite a range of initiatives to introduce cleaner fuels, a large proportion of poor people in India continue to rely on solid fuels for cooking and heating, with severe implications for personal and family health. This paper seeks to open up the various fuel-supply strategies that underpin domestic energy use in low-income settings to explain the...

There is rising interest in connecting global value chains with sites of extraction to ensure that mineral resources, wherever extracted, are governed to benefit communities. Despite commitments by policymakers and African intergovernmental bodies to governance that does not disenfranchise communities, voices of those affected remain peripheral to...

The dominance of coal for Indian energy security might, finally, be about to reduce as increasing demands are made for a just transition to cleaner and more community-friendly forms of energy. Possibilities for mine-affected communities to take control of the coalfield lands that will become abandoned by the inevitable closure of coal are explored.

How a country responds to a rupture such as the COVID-19 pandemic can be revelatory of its governance. Governance entails not only the exercise but also the constitution of authority. The pandemic response thus presents a real-world disruption to verify or problematize some truisms about national governance and produce novel comparisons and insight...

This article analyses how long-running, multilayered conflicts over water at the Hirakud dam underpin present-day societal divisions in Odisha state. There are four unresolved conflicts over this dam in the state: movements against displacement, movements for rehabilitation, struggles between agricultural and industrial water users, and, finally, d...

In this article we introduce the special issue through framing the debate on the role of caste in India’s current land wars. We draw attention to how caste consistently mediates land transfers in present day India by pre-empting, undermining, or fuelling processes of social contestation, as well as the ways in which land claims in turn shape realig...

This article applies an (Urban) Political Ecology lens to an urban fishing community in India to understand how people are affected by coastal transformations involving intertwined socio-economic and biophysical processes. Despite urbanization proceeding swiftly across most of the world, the literature on Small-Scale Fisheries has only partially in...

The adivasi population represents a special case in India’s new land wars. Strong individual and community rights to agricultural and forest lands have been enacted for this group based on notions of adivasi identities as primeval, but without linking these to economic and political influence. This article interrogates the adivasi land question see...

Coal extraction and processing remains at the heart of energy security in India. As ever larger amounts of electricity are produced to support overall economic growth, this creates environmental justice challenges as people in the coal-producing areas are exposed to perilous air pollution levels. Federal technocrats shape the environmental governan...

This paper examines transport infrastructure of only middling quality at a Jharkhand coalfield as supporting rather than preventing national energy security. The modest technical efficiency of the infrastructure emerges from a need to align the national provision of energy with a complex political ecology of coal in which various actors seek benefi...

This article examines how unstable land on a sandy peninsula in peri-urban Mangaluru becomes part of urban land contestation to primarily support continued informal tenure. The peninsula is undergoing shifts changing both its shape and land use under the influence of a range of biophysical and human forces. For the time being, fisherfolk can remain...

This article identifies the two dominant discourses that attempt to explain socioenvironmental change from bauxite mining in Eastern India and compares them to empirical material from three proposed mining locations. The anti-mining “life-giving hills” discourse understands the bauxite-bearing hills as an essential part of a wider ecosystem that su...

Bauxite mineral projects in central India have in recent years generated conflicts over both the physical environment and equitable development for very vulnerable people. In one such project, a joint venture between the state government of Andhra Pradesh and a private investor, attempts are currently being made to open up land constitutionally res...

The new Indian state is a relocated state, not a retreating one. This comment on Kanchan Chandra's article "The New Indian State: The Relocation of Patronage in the Post-Liberalisation Economy" (EPW, 10 October 2015) says that it is also a state that struggles to realise its new development agenda.

This article examines the implementation of social and environmental criteria for a bauxite mining and refining project as a way of understanding wider governance processes around controversial industrial projects in India. It does this by tracing the extent to which decision-making processes have been able to mediate between government support for...

This article examines the controversy over land transfers for two proposed but now deadlocked industrial projects in India. Both projects – one in Andhra Pradesh, the other in West Bengal – were initially presented as key to the future development of each state and given strong backing by their respective state governments. They also appeared well...

This monograph presents the results of an exploratory study carried out in collaboration with the NGO Vasundhara based in Bhubaneshwar. In this project livelihoods analysis and mapmaking technologies have been used to explore to what extent international experiences of participatory mapping can be used in India to support local resource rights. Gan...

Bauxite mineral projects in central India have in recent years generated conflicts over both the physical environment and equitable development for very vulnerable people. In one such project, a joint venture between the state government of Andhra Pradesh and a private investor, attempts are currently being made to open up land constitutionally res...

A bauxite/aluminium project very similar to the Vedanta project in Odisha is coming up in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh. AnRak Aluminium, a company of the government of Ras al-Khaimah of the United Arab Emirates and Penna Cement of AP has secured approval for both an aluminium complex and the bauxite mines, but the fi nal forest clearanc...

This thesis explores the contestation over a bauxite mining project in the State of Andhra Pradesh which includes a number of factors that may be seen as producing conflicts over both the physical environment and equitable, inclusive development for very vulnerable people. A key issue at stake is an alternative use of land in the constitutionally p...