Dissertation: "Encircling the Sun: A Political Ecology of Solar Development in India"

Certified Spring 2019  

My dissertation is a comparative study examining the social power behind two solar parks in semi-arid India. Specifically, I examine processes of state-making, dispossession, social differentiation and resistance to solar development in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. Post-Paris Agreement, India is developing solar parks at a breakneck pace to mitigate climate change. Given the massive space required to develop such large-scale energy infrastructures, the state acquires vast stretches of marginal public land and smallholders land. Farmers alienated from the means of production are not hired by the solar park, leading to a partial proletarianization of the peasantry. Enclosure of public ‘wastelands’ to develop the solar parks have also dispossessed resource-dependent women of access to firewood and grazing lands, (re)producing intersectional subject positions. The solar park’s discourses of ‘gender positive’ project design and outcomes, combined with female empowerment pledges by institutions associated with the solar parks, harken back to earlier problematic paradigms of gender and development. Resistance to the solar parks takes many forms, including resistance against expulsion, resistance around the terms of incorporation, discursive resistance and resistance through embodied affectivities. Indisputably, a swift transition to renewable energy generation in India is necessary to stave off the worst climate-related impacts. However, the urgency of low-carbon transitions in the Anthropocene must not reproduce underdevelopment through green grabbing. As the Government of India develops more solar parks in the drylands to profitably mitigate climate change and generate much-needed renewable energy, dispossessed peasants shouldn’t be left in the dark.