UCLA

This dissertation is an ethnography of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in India. It examines how CSA programs, promoted by organizations like the World Bank as responses to agriculture’s ecological challenges, are reshaping agrarian futures. Despite opposition from global peasant movements such as La Via Campesina, CSA continues to expand globally. India has become a key site for investments in climate-smart technologies. The central questions this research engages are: How is sustainability conceptualized and operationalized through technological infrastructures in Indian agriculture? What frictions, failures, and resistances emerge in efforts to scale these initiatives, and how are such tensions managed, absorbed, or rendered invisible? Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across agriculture technology start-ups, rural farms, industry events, and bureaucratic workshops, this dissertation examines two contrasting cases––a start-up that attempted to rapidly scale (“blitzscale”) sustainability interventions in rice cultivation and generate carbon credits, and a digital organic marketplace that aimed to connect farmers to urban consumers and grow “patiently.” Through these cases, this dissertation offers critiques from within that remain attentive to the lived contradictions of climate-smart interventions. At the same time, it seeks to trace the possibilities of desirable futures emerging from within the fissures of these ongoing interventions. This dissertation conceptualizes “violent sustainability” to highlight the unintended harm inflicted on farmers and rural marketing agents due to structural violence underlying tech-entrepreneurialism and design flaws of blitzscaled programs. It shows how rural agents, facing immense pressure, turned to the affordances of nonhuman actors to push back against the startup and secure their livelihoods. In doing so, it extends James Scott’s notion of “infrapolitics” to conceptualize “more-than-human infrapolitics” as the multispecies entanglements through which everyday forms of resistance take shape. Here, resistance is not understood as the sole action of human agents but as emerging relationally, co-constituted by interactions among humans, technologies, and ecological processes. In doing so, it proposes that the cumulative effect of more-than-human infrapolitics may also serve the interests of the powerful. Finally, this research underscores the challenges of translating ethical intentions into sustainable practices.