Summary

Disasters, climate change, and extreme weather events have to be studied beyond hazard-centric paradigms. The differential vulnerability of various social groups to hazards is a function of their social location and access to resources. Vulnerability to disasters is an extension of social vulnerability, and, therefore, historicizing people’s lived experiences is important. The developmental approaches of the colonial state and historical continuities of modernist pursuits of development exacerbate existing vulnerabilities of different social groups, while producing newer manifestations of vulnerabilities.

Critical exploration of colonial administration of tribal lands, forest regions, and places defined as backward or excluded, can help address the ways in which the vulnerability of tribal populations was created and persists to this day. It is important to place tribal women’s experiences within the historical settings of environmental degradation. Locating their experiences in the postcolonial age enables an indigenous ecological feminist theoretical viewpoint on decolonial approaches to the historical continuity of power in the context of disasters and climate change. Gender and environmental issues connect to demonstrate how tribal women are particularly impacted by these concerns. Utilization of an ecofeminist viewpoint can place decolonial praxis in context and highlight the resilience and agency of Indigenous women. This line of inquiry illustrates the ongoing battles and opposition to environmental injustices via this prism by undertaking a feminist interrogation of ecological degradation and impacts of development on tribal women.

In tribal lands, the historical trajectories of development have been based on ideas of appropriation and accumulation by dispossession, and these forms of development are privileged over other forms. The Western-Northern hegemony on the conception, dissemination, and praxis of development contributes to the construction of inferiority of some geographies that has differential impacts on the genders. There are linkages between the historical colonial encounter and contemporary developmental paradigms in tribal areas; neoliberal and growth-led developmental models have contributed to existing vulnerabilities while producing newer ones. The idea of “doing intersectionality correctly” has been an area for much deliberation, and even a lament by feminists especially in developmental contexts. Human societies are yet to emerge from the shadows of colonialism, and they perpetuate cultures of capitalism in the context of development; these exacerbate disaster occurrence and impacts.