ABSTRACT
It is difficult to imagine anything more urgent for critical agrarian scholars and movements than the questions Borras et al. raise about how to develop an emancipatory mode of confronting climate change in agrarian and rural settings. Unfortunately, the researchers find in India that institutionalized approaches to such challenges in the form of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA)/Climate-Smart Villages (CSV) point in the opposite direction and which, as such, are obstacles to the emancipatory approach Borras et al. call on us to imagine. This chapter subjects such obstacles to critical scrutiny, arguing that CSA/CSV programs take the form of neoliberal technologies of government which intensify the disenfranchisement and dispossession of Indian farmers. By doing so, these technologies of government reduce farmers’ ability and, perhaps, willingness towards the development of ‘a sufficiently anti-capitalist, trans-environmental and agrarian approach to confront climate change’.
