The Environment as a Meta-narrative: Introduction to a Special Issue

Abstract

Narratives about protecting, speaking/acting for the environment are ubiquitous in a wide variety of heterogenous social situations. The essays in this special issue examine the form, content, context and materiality of the discourse of environmental protection. Based on field studies in India, the essays each examine the discourses in and of the courtroom, logic of state bureaucracy, legitimating frames of neoliberal urban policy, regional development narratives and subjectivities developed in indigenous social movements against land acquisition. In each of these contexts the environment is invoked, sometimes in strategic or even instrumental ways; in others, a green discourse is normative, even constitutive of subjectivities of the people involved. It is shaped by material relations in each specific context. The malleability of form and content of the environmental narrative encourages its appropriation in multiple registers and allows meaningful expression of diverse material contestations through it. It is in this diversity of appropriation that we suggest that the environment is a meta-narrative of our times.