Struggle and solidarity in transforming urban futures: The fisher fight for Ennore wetlands in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Mainstream academic research on sustainability transformation overwhelmingly sees it as an innovation-centred, top-down, governance-led process playing out within the capitalist system. This research addresses these biases and the neglect of subaltern agency by examining environmental justice struggles as forces of sustainability transformation. It focuses on the ongoing fisher struggle for the tidal wetlands of Ennore in Tamil Nadu, India.

Stretching from the northern edge of Chennai, the Ennore wetlands have been a colonial frontier since the 18th century: first targeted by British empire-building, then by post-independence industrialisation, and later by neoliberal reforms that turned them into an industrial sacrifice zone. Fishers from oppressed castes have resisted this transformation and defended their lifeworlds against dispossession and degradation.

Drawing on my research fieldwork as well as a decade of ethnographic engagement while working alongside the Ennore fishers in their struggle, I theorise how subaltern environmentalisms disrupt both the urban-industrial logics of development and the dominant sustainability paradigms that seek to manage their externalities, and how such disruptions enact material, epistemic, and ontological transformations. The thesis traces the struggle’s evolution over five decades from its hyper-local reactive form to a trans-scalar campaign involving legal interventions, coalition-building and cultural and gastro-activism as well as opportunistic campaigns involving more-than-human agents such as the Northeast monsoon and focusing events such as the 2015 Chennai floods.

The study asks: 1. How do subaltern struggles emerge from the margins to challenge hegemonic processes that deny recognition to them and their ways of knowing? 2. How do subaltern struggles for environmental justice contribute to transformative change for sustainability? Phrased differently, what does isustainability transformation look like when seen from the perspective of subaltern struggles?

From my positionality as activist and researcher, I developed a novel methodological approach—solidarity ethnography—that extends activist ethnography by centring subaltern voices and foregrounding reflexivity. The qualitative study draws on analysis of field notes and interviews, archival work, and collaborative outputs of the Save Ennore Creek Campaign, which was set up by Chennai-based activists, including myself, to mobilise solidarity for the fisher struggle.

Two analytical frameworks guide the study: Medina’s (2011) Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance, which approaches domination and resistance using concepts drawn from Ignorance studies, and a Political Ecology framework of Transformative Resistance that I developed for this research. Together, they reframe domination and resistance as a dynamic of ignorance politics, allowing the analysis to trace how specific forms of ignorance are produced, mobilized, and contested, and how resistance under certain conditions becomes a force for sustainability transformations.

The research reveals the role of ignorance, rather than knowledge, in policy-making and exposes the often uncivil and illiberal nature of civil society and liberal law to present a tentative theory of ‘civil’ dispossession that targets non-property spaces and their users. By tracing how Ennore’s fishers resist, persist, and transform, the thesis demonstrates that subaltern struggles are not merely reactive but generative; they reimagine both sustainability and transformation from the margins. In doing so, the research challenges dominant paradigms of sustainability and insists on a justice-first, present-centred approach to ecological and social futures.