Unmaking and remaking the coast in southwestern India: a political ecology of erosions and accretions

The coast of southwestern India is at the crossroads of several social, economic and environmental long-term processes: the modernisation of artisanal fishing techniques, a portled development strategy, Blue Growth and increasingly severe coastal erosion. The purpose of this thesis is to make analytical sense of these different transformations and their interplay, to understand what they tell us about the evolution of the coast, a space so far characterised as a geographic, social and economic margin in various academic and media accounts. Using a multi-sited design, I look at two different and seemingly unrelated areas in a southern district. First, I focus on a “bottom-up” project, i.e. a small fishing harbour constructed upon the demands of the local fish-workers. Second, I look at an international Seaport project. Initiated by the state government and implemented through a public-private partnership, I see this massive infrastructure as a “top-down” project. My overarching argument contends that the coast of the district is being assembled into a frontier for “development”, understood as technological/infrastructural modernisation and capitalist expansion, of which these two sites actually represent two variegated and complementary “sub-processes”. Throughout this thesis, I therefore characterise the frontier, a notion better understood in terms of effects than in terms of essence. First, I argue that the frontier both results from, and coheres into, new imaginations and discourses. Secondly and most centrally, I argue that the dynamics of coastal erosion and accretion, i.e. the biophysical transformations that result from the construction of infrastructure such as the ones I study, are a key pillar of the frontiers assembled around my two sites. Third, I argue that these socioenvironmental processes contribute to shift the boundaries between three key actors of the nature and society interactions around my fieldsites.