Call for Papers - JusTIS Workshop: Climate Change, Urban Transformation, and Informal Workers in Indian Cities

Indian cities stand at the intersection of accelerating climate change and rapid urbanisation. Rising temperatures, intensifying heatwaves, flooding, water stress, and air pollution are already reshaping urban environments, infrastructures, and livelihoods (Chitra, 2022; Ghertner, 2019; Negi and Srigyan, 2021; Ranganathan, 2015). At the same time, India is projected to add hundreds of millions of urban residents in the coming decades, intensifying pressures on housing, transport, labour markets, and basic services. Climate change and urbanisation are thus not parallel processes but deeply entangled transformations unfolding within cities in uneven, socially differentiated ways.

These transformations are not socially neutral. Informal workers—including street vendors, transport operators, construction labourers, sanitation workers, waste pickers, and platform-based delivery workers—are disproportionately exposed to climate risks while simultaneously navigating regulatory uncertainty, infrastructural deficits, and precarious labour regimes (Dodman et al. 2023; Harriss-White, 2021). Their livelihoods depend on streets, public spaces, mobility systems, and urban services that are themselves being reconfigured under climate-mitigation and adaptation agendas. Any serious engagement with climate change in Indian cities must therefore account for how environmental risks and transition policies reshape informal work and labour relations.

These contemporary challenges are embedded in longer historical trajectories. Colonial urban planning produced durable spatial inequalities through racialised and caste-based segregation, uneven infrastructural provision, and differentiated access to land, water, and sanitation (Ghertner, 2019). Postcolonial urban development and subsequent liberalisation have reworked—rather than dismantled—many of these hierarchies through new political-economic arrangements, regulatory regimes, and modes of informalisation. As a result, exposure to climate risk and access to adaptive capacity in Indian cities remain profoundly shaped by caste, religion, gender, class, labour, and historically sedimented urban forms of governance (Baviskar, 2020; Ranganathan, 2021).

Urban environmental research in India has expanded significantly in recent years and contributed important insights to international debates. Scholars have foregrounded caste and religion in analyses of environmental vulnerability and governance (Sahana, 2025; Sircar, 2022); critiqued bourgeois environmentalism and middle-class dominance in urban environmental politics (Baviskar, 2020; Sharma, 2017); examined informality as constitutive of climate justice (Chu and Michael, 2019); and highlighted the everyday, lived dimensions of environmental harm and adaptation (Chung, Keith and Schwanen, 2026). Yet much of the policy discourse on urban climate action continues to privilege technological solutions—electric mobility, renewable energy, smart infrastructure (Khosla and Bhardwaj, 2019)—often without sustained attention to how such interventions affect informal workers’ livelihoods, dignity, and political claims.

This workshop seeks to foreground informal workers in Indian cities within debates on climate change, urban governance, and transition policies. It invites critical scholarship and practitioner engagement that examines how climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives intersect with labour regimes, regulatory frameworks, urban citizenship, and everyday struggles for dignity and recognition. Rather than treating climate action as a technical or sectoral exercise, the workshop approaches it as a political and social process with uneven consequences across different groups of urban workers.

Organised under the Just Transitions on Indian Streets (JusTIS) project, which examines how climate change and urban transformations are negotiated on the streets of Indian cities, the workshop aims to create a space for dialogue between scholars, policy practitioners, and civil society actors. It seeks contributions that not only analyse inequality and exclusion but also engage with questions of governance reform, institutional practice, and pathways towards more equitable urban climate action.

Contributions could engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes and questions:

• Uneven experiences of climate change and urban transitions across caste, religion, gender, class, and occupational groups
• Historical and political-economic analyses of urban development and how they shape contemporary labour precarity and climate vulnerability
• Streets and urban public spaces as sites of work, climate exposure, regulation, and contestation
• The interaction between sustainability agendas and informal economies, including displacement, formalisation, and restructuring of labour regimes
• Climate mitigation and adaptation policies and their implications for informal transport, street vending, platform work, sanitation, and other urban livelihoods
• Dignity, recognition, and urban citizenship in relation to labour, governance, and environmental policy
• The role of law, planning, and municipal governance in shaping workers’ rights, protections, and vulnerabilities under climate action
• Everyday practices of adaptation, coping, resistance, and collective organisation among informal workers

By centring informal workers within analyses of climate change and urban transformation, the workshop aims to deepen debates on equity and governance in Indian cities and to generate insights that are analytically rigorous and policy-relevant.

The workshop will be held in person in Bengaluru and will be organised as an intensive, discussion-oriented forum. It will feature pre-circulated papers and thematic sessions, with an emphasis on collective engagement and feedback. We anticipate that the papers presented at the workshop will form the basis of either an edited volume or a special issue.

The organisers will cover domestic airfare and accommodation for selected participants. Participants will be expected to attend the workshop in full and to circulate a draft paper in advance.

If you are interested in participating, please submit an abstract of 300–500 words to gaurav.mittal@ouce.ox.ac.uk by 19 June 2026. Abstracts should include your full name, current affiliation, and location, and should clearly indicate whether you would require financial support to travel to Bengaluru.

• Abstract submission deadline: 19 June 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2026
• Draft paper submission: 30 September 2026
• Workshop: 19-20 November 2026 (tentative)

Baviskar, A. (2020). Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. Sage.

Chitra, V. (2022). Remembering the river: Flood, memory and infrastructural ecologies of stormwater drainage in Mumbai. Urban Studies, 59(9), 1855-1871.

Chu, E., & Michael, K. (2019). Recognition in urban climate justice: marginality and exclusion of migrants in Indian cities. Environment and Urbanization, 31(1), 139-156.

Chung, J. H., Keith, M., & Schwanen, T. (2026). Climate change adaptation in South Asian cities: A scoping review of literature from 2008 to 2022. Cities, 170, 106697.

Dodman, D., Sverdlik, A., Agarwal, S., Kadungure, A., Kothiwal, K., Machemedze, R., & Verma, S. (2023). Climate change and informal workers: Towards an agenda for research and practice. Urban Climate, 48, 101401.

Ghertner, D. A. (2019). The colonial roots of India’s air pollution crisis. Economic and Political Weekly, 54(47), 68-74.

Harriss-White, B. (2021). India’s informal economy and climate change. Seminar, 744.

Khosla, R., & Bhardwaj, A. (2019). Urbanization in the time of climate change: Examining the response of Indian cities. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 10(1), e560.

Negi, R., & Srigyan, P. (2021). Atmosphere of collaboration: Air pollution science, politics and ecopreneurship in Delhi. Routledge.

Ranganathan, M. (2015). Storm drains as assemblages: The political ecology of flood risk in post‐colonial Bangalore. Antipode, 47(5), 1300-1320.

Ranganathan, M. (2021).  Caste, Racialization, and the Making of Environmental Unfreedoms in Urban India. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 45(2), 257-277.

Sahana, M. (2025). Hindu nationalism, climate reductionism, and the political ecology of dalits on Char Islands: Does caste matter for climate resilience in India? Geoforum, 163, 104298.

Sharma, M. (2017). Caste & Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics. Oxford University Press.

Sircar, S. (2022). Reimagining Climate Justice as Caste Justice. In Kashwan P. (Eds) Climate Justice in India. Cambridge University Press. pp. 162-182.