Situating climate change narrative for conceptualizing adaptation strategies: a case study of coffee growers in South India

This paper argues the need to situate the climate change narrative in lived everyday life for conceptualizing adaptation strategies. Climate change in its dominant narrative talks of global risks while it is the local risks experienced in everyday life which adaptation needs to address. This paper engages with this challenge using the specific case study of coffee growers in South India and focuses on two strategies available to them to address their rainfall risk: irrigation (sprinkler and rain-guns) and rainfall insurance. The paper unpacks growers' decision-making process to invest or not to invest in insurance and irrigation and showcases that even though variation in rainfall is a significant concern for the growers still investing in neither of the two strategies (insurance and rain-gun irrigation) or only in sprinkler irrigation remains the most preferred decision scenarios. The paper argues that rain-gun irrigation and insurance reconfigure growers' relation with rainfall. In this reconfigured relation, the agency is removed from growers and passed on to a scientifically calibrated assessment of rainfall. Growers' reluctance to buy into these schemes, thus, is indicative of their reluctance to buy into the reconfigured system where the agency of knowledge has been removed from them and passed on to the scientific assessments. In a situated context, thus, climate change for coffee growers in South India is an issue of agency and trust. Therefore, thinking through adaptation strategies for addressing the situated narrative of climate change challenge would require opening the process of calibrating rainfall for insurance to gain growers' trust. Additionally, making science more inclusive of lived experiences on the ground.