Working in an NGO in the spaces of “climate” and “environment” made me reflect on our work’s scale. Given that climate change is a global crisis, our work is shaped by globally articulated agendas, materially influenced by donor priorities. Yet, the manifestations of this crisis are hyperlocal—whether it’s rougher, more unpredictable seas or a cycle of rains out of step with what communities are used to. I began thinking about how these experiences get translated as we move up the scales of influence within the systems that govern us. What gets lost when we address local issues through global lenses?
One aspect of my work has been understanding how grassroots efforts interact with the larger scope of influence of the state and nation. How do ground-level perspectives influence the agendas of state actors? And how relevant are state and national-level agendas to struggles on the ground? I recently attended the Oxford India Centre’s conference on Cities and Climate Change in New Delhi, and the papers we discussed had me questioning the typical modes of knowledge production prioritized by civil society organizations. Given our dependence on institutions acting on large-scale priorities, we often orient our research and agendas to be legible to these institutions rather than truly learning from the communities we serve. This is especially true for NGOs with broad national and international scopes. This blog is not meant to criticize the development sector but to offer reflections on what I think should change to fulfil the missions NGOs set out for themselves.
In particular, I really enjoyed the research of Nityanand Jayaraman, who shared his work with the fisher communities of coastal Tamil Nadu, titled Sea Change, Seasons Changed, which resonated with the questions I am asking while working on my project. He co-investigates the practice of fishing and how it is being impacted by changing seas with Palayam, an elder of the community. Over the course of a couple years, Jayaraman himself lets go of his tendency to “objectively” and “rationally” understand how the seas are changing, and instead lets it be articulated through the ways fisher folks have experienced the changing seas, instead of “climate change” he describes it as “sea change” centering the impact as it is perceived on the local scale.
He articulates his resistance as “epistemic disconcernment”: the tendency to relegate alien ways of knowing to the realm of myths or superstition, and the discomfort we feel when confronted with new ways of engaging with the world. This phenomenon is bilateral. “Rational” institutions occupied with producing numbers, indexes, and “objective” information—typically the civil society sector or the state—cannot hold the complexities of lived experiences encountered on the ground. Conversely, communities on the ground are often left wondering how and why the numbers institutions focus on collecting relate to their most pressing problems.
This is especially relevant in the context of climate change—a term Jayaraman believes has become overused to the point of being stale and abstracted from people’s material realities, a point I also agree with. An issue can be environmental without needing to be approached as a climate issue, which then relegates it be studied in a particular manner. Jayaraman describes how the Tamil language lacked a word for climate change, and how what we as practitioners deem as climate change is instead described in terms of it’s material impacts. The community’s conception of environmental change centered on an “unequal, unhealthy present,” while institutions focused on a “calamitous future.” The speculative nature of how climate change is articulated can be alienating, especially when our primary modes of discussing it involve CO2 emissions, degrees of warming, and other important but abstract metrics, divorced from what one can perceive bodily.
This disconnect may explain why it has been difficult to form grassroots-driven coalitions around climate change. Its future orientation often seems divorced from the present material realities already impacting communities of all classes—such as fires in Los Angeles—but most acutely affecting the world’s most deprived populations, who lack the agency to escape these crises.
If we are to build cohesive, collaborative, and equitable movements around climate change, we must orient our knowledge-generation practices around local conceptions and material impacts rather than extracting information solely to write reports for global audiences. The two need not be incompatible. Often, addressing the source of local material deprivation—such as a mine encroaching on a tribal community’s traditional forest land—also points to a source of the global crisis. I am not suggesting the replacement one method of knowledge collection with another but for integrating both approaches, viewing them on a gradient from specific, local contexts to general, global ones. The global informs the nation, which informs the landscape; and the landscape informs the nation, which in turn informs the global.
The issue is not the existence of generalizable knowledge but how it is centered in development work, to the point of alienating the communities we claim to advocate for. When interviewing my NGO’s partners in Chhattisgarh, they emphasized the need to rebuild trust with communities—highlighting how long-term engagement, transparency, and addressing root causes can counter the mistrust created by past experiences with organizations that prioritized their own agendas over community needs.
If we make our knowledge practices more flexible and view local qualitative knowledge with the same respect as the bird’s-eye knowledge of satellites and sensors, communities can have the agency to address what they feel they need. This approach, in the long run, is often more impactful than addressing community needs based on assumptions. This interrogative practice is vital for any community-engaged work, not just in the environmental space. Asking yourself what knowledge your organization values and critically looking at if that knowledge can inform tangible outcomes for the people you serve is crucial to forming reciprocal relationships.
To build more effective and respectful partnerships, civil society organizations must move beyond assumptions and actively engage communities in identifying their own needs and co-creating solutions. One example I always return to is an NGO I was involved with during my undergraduate years, where the founder sent medical equipment to a village in Uganda. All of it ended up in a warehouse because the community already had the equipment. The founder later realized—a seemingly obvious point—that helping someone means helping them on their terms, especially when there’s a power imbalance between an NGO and a vulnerable community, which may hesitate in refusing the efforts of civil society organisation.
I urge my peers in the development sector, to examine how they inform their work. What do these methods leave out? What are the consequences of these omissions? I leave this not as a critique of anyone else’s experience or mine, but as food for thought as we aspire to make truly impactful change.
Citations
Srimathi, Geetha. “Study by Chennai Fisherman Shines Light on Changing Sea Patterns and Declining Catch.” The Hindu, March 10, 2024. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/study-by-chennai-fisherman-shines-light-on-changing-sea-patterns-and-declining-catch/article67935570.ece.
