Constrained Climate Justice: Development, Cost-Benefit Rationality, and Ecological Governance in Uttarakhand, India

Abstract

This conceptual paper interrogates the tension between infrastructure-led development and climate justice in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan state of India that serves simultaneously as an ecological common of national importance and a frontier for mega-project expansion. Drawing on political ecology, development economics, and post-development theory, the paper establishes that contemporary development in Uttarakhand is operationalised through a tripartite logic of growth-oriented Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA), national security imperatives, and political-electoral optics. This logic systematically constrains the scope of climate justice by rendering the costs of ecological destruction, community displacement, and intergenerational risk as externalities that fall outside the calculus of project approval. The paper introduces the concept of 'constrained climate justice' to capture how justice claims are not absent from policy discourse but are actively reshaped, diluted, and subordinated within dominant development frameworks. Using the Rishikesh-Karnaprayag Railway project as its principal illustrative case, the paper demonstrates how technocratic governance privileges economic valuation over social and ecological considerations. The study contributes to theoretical debates by reconceptualising climate justice not as an aspirational absence requiring insertion into development frameworks, but as a structurally constrained presence whose emancipatory potential is continuously curtailed by institutional architecture. The paper concludes by proposing alternative evaluation frameworks that could recalibrate the relationship between development velocity and justice claims in ecologically fragile regions.