Decolonizing Climate Futures: Imagining Long-Term Futures with Fishworkers in Kerala, India

Background and Purpose: This paper presents results of a pilot study for a project exploring how fishworkers and farmers in Kerala, India imagine the long-term futures of their communities in the context of climate change. Small-scale fishworkers and farmers are some of the most profoundly impacted populations affected by climate change, which threatens their livelihood, well-being, and security (Malhi et al., 2021; Morton, 2007; Seggel & De Young, 2016). Many are already struggling with impacts from drought, flooding, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, which can make it difficult to look beyond the daily struggle for survival (Barange et al., 2018; Hertel & Rosch, 2010). Yet long-term planning for climate adaptation is already underway in universities, think tanks, and government agencies, and it is crucial to engage these communities in the planning process. How can climate change planning be more inclusive of small-scale fishworkers’ and farmers’ own anxieties, desires, and visions for the future?

Methods: This pilot study integrated diverse qualitative methods from the humanities and social sciences in novel ways. The aim was to develop a co-creative process in which fishworkers and farmers imagine distant futures for their livelihoods and identify opportunities to flourish. Researchers conducted co-creative activities (including collaborative timeline generation, short story and oral storytelling workshops, and ghostwriting techniques) with residents of a fishing village in Kerala, India (N=2)). Simultaneously, researchers used ethnographic fieldwork methods—i.e., participant observation, recorded interviews (N=18), and recordings of social interaction—to document the co-creative process and solicit explict reflections about the process from participants. Recruitment sought to maximize diversity in terms of age, gender, and educational background, each of which were anticipated to be relevant to participant engagement (Palinkas et al., 2015). Analysis adhered to established principles for ethnographic research, including iterative analysis beginning during fieldwork (Morgan & Nica, 2020), an emphasis on surprising or unexpected findings that force revision of emerging analysis (Muller, 2014; Padgett, 2017), and contextualizing specific social interactions with regard to broader cultural patterns and life circumstances (Bernard, 2017). Field notes were coded using Nvivo QDA and ELAN linguistic analysis software.

Results: Participants in co-creative activities produced a wide range of imaginative projections of possible futures and expressed both anxiety and hope about how their livelihoods and communities may change over the next one-hundred years. Barriers to this imaginative work included power imbalances that made it difficult to think “outside the boxes” of dominant framings of problems and possibilities. Such power imbalances also made some participants wonder about whether the possibilities they imagined were practical. In addition, participants varied in whether they imagined a good future as a continuation of or a departure from their fishing livelihood, with generational differences evident.

Conclusions and Implications: By showing how the imagined futures of members of fishworking communities differ from dominant frames, this study points to the value of including frontline communities in long-term climate envisioning processes. The study develops novel tools for facilitating such inclusion.