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Access to sufficient and clean freshwater is essential for all life. Water is also essential for the functioning of food systems: as a key input into food production, but also in processing and preparation, and as a food itself. Water scarcity and pollution are growing, affecting poorer populations most, and particularly food producers. Malnutrition levels are also on the rise, and this is closely linked to water scarcity. The achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2 and 6 are co-dependent. Solutions for jointly improving food systems and water security outcomes include: (1) strengthening efforts to retain water-based ecosystems and their functions; (2) improving agricultural water management for better diets for all; (3) reducing water and food losses beyond the farmgate; (4) coordinating water with nutrition and health interventions; (5) increasing the environmental sustainability of food systems; (6) explicitly addressing social inequities in water-nutrition linkages; and (7) improving data quality and monitoring for water-food system linkages, drawing on innovations in information and communications technology (ICT). Climate change and other environmental and societal changes make the implementation and scaling of solutions more urgent than ever.

Droughts have severe direct impacts on the livelihoods of rural populations. Thus, the management of water for communal agriculture and water supply should be well coordinated to enhance drought resilience. Notwithstanding the interrelations among water management institutions in South Africa, there are complexities in the way these institutions work together, both in preparation for, and during drought times. In this article, we examine the governance of water resources in South Africa with a view to understanding institutional coordination in drought management at different operational scales. Using a qualitative approach, the roles and relationships between water actors at the local and regional level were analyzed for their adequacy in building local level drought resilience in a village in the Limpopo province, South Africa. Key informant interviews conducted revealed operational drought management challenges that emanate from communication barriers, coordination inconsistences, and undefined, unclear actor roles and responsibilities during disasters. The top-down approach to disaster management, while of some value, currently constrains the effectiveness of the local-level institutions implementing local drought risk reduction efforts. Achieving more successful water and drought governance endeavors could be enhanced by greater and wider engagement with community-based actors and water management institutions.

Since February 2021, countless lives have been lost in India, which has compounded the social and economic devastation caused by the second wave of COVID-19. The sharp surge in cases across the country overwhelmed the health infrastructure, with people left scrambling for hospital beds, critical drugs, and oxygen. As of May 2021, infections began to come down in urban areas. However, the effects of the second wave continued to be felt in rural areas. This is the worst humanitarian and public health crisis the country has witnessed since independence; while the continued spread of COVID-19 variants will have regional and global implications. With a slow vaccine rollout and overwhelmed health infrastructure, there is a critical need to examine India's response and recommend measures to further arrest the current spread of infection and to prevent and prepare against future waves. This brief is a rapid social science review and analysis of the second wave of COVID-19 in India. It draws on emerging reports, literature, and regional social science expertise to examine reasons for the second wave, explain its impact, and highlight the systemic issues that hindered the response. This brief puts forth vital considerations for local and national government, civil society, and humanitarian actors at global and national levels, with implications for future waves of COVID-19 in low- and middle-income countries. This review is part of the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) series on the COVID-19 response in India. It was developed for SSHAP by Mihir R. Bhatt (AIDMI), Shilpi Srivastava (IDS), Megan Schmidt-Sane (IDS), and Lyla Mehta (IDS) with input and reviews from Deepak Sanan (Former Civil Servant; Senior Visiting Fellow, Centre for Policy Research), Subir Sinha (SOAS), Murad Banaji (Middlesex University London), Delhi Rose Angom (Oxfam India), Olivia Tulloch (Anthrologica) and Santiago Ripoll (IDS). It is the responsibility of SSHAP.

भारत में फ़रवरी 2021 से अनगिनत जानों की हानि हुई है जिसने कोविड-19 द्वारा हुए सामाजिक और आर्थिक प्रलय को बढ़ा दिया है । देश भर में तीव्र गति से बढ़ते संक्रमित मामलों ने बुनियादी स्वास्थ्य ढाँचे को हिला दिया है, जिससे आम आदमी अस्पताल में बिस्तर, आवश्यक दवाइयों और ऑक्सिजन के लिए हाथ पांव मरने के लिए मजबूर हो गया । मई 2021 तक शहरों में संक्रमण का प्रभाव कम होना शुरू हुआ। हालाँकि गाँवों में दूसरी लहर का प्रकोप जारी है । आज़ादी के बाद देश सबसे बड़ी और बुरी मानवीय तथा सार्वजनिक स्वास्थ्य संकट का साक्षी बना है, जबकि क्षेत्रीय और वैश्विक स्तर पर लगातार फैलते हुए कोविड-19 प्रकारों के विविध परिणाम होंगे । धीमी गति से शुरू हुआ टीका करण अभियान और स्वास्थ्य सेवायों पर अत्यधिक भार को देखते हुए, भारत की प्रतिक्रिया, संक्रमण को और फैलने से रोकने के लिए उपायों की योजना, भविष्य के लहरों के खिलाफ तैयारी, की जाँच करने की बहुत अधिक ज़रूरी है । यह संक्षिप्त भारत में आई कोविड-19 की दूसरी लहर का सामाजिक विज्ञान समीक्षा व विश्लेषण है । यह दूसरी लहर की जाँच हेतु उदीयमान रिपोर्ट्स, साहित्य, क्षेत्रीय सामाजिक विज्ञान का एक चित्र खींचता है, उसका प्रभाव समझाता है, और उन सभी व्यवस्थित मुद्दों को उभरता है जो सही प्रतिक्रिया देने में रुकावट सिद्ध हुए । यह संक्षिप्त वैश्विक और राष्ट्रीय स्तर पर स्थानीय और राष्ट्रीय सरकार, नागरिक समाज और मानवतावादी विचारकों के लिए महत्वपूर्ण चिंतन रखता है, जिसमें लघु और मध्यम आय वाले देशों में कोविड-19 की भावी लहरों के लिए निहितार्थ हैं । यह समीक्षा भारत में कोविड-19 प्रतिक्रिया पर सोशीयल सायन्स इन ह्युमेनीटेरीयन एक्शन प्लेटफोर्म (SSHAP संक्षिप्त) का हिस्सा है । इसे मिहिर आर. भट्ट (ए.आई.डी.एम.आई.), शिल्पी श्रीवास्तव (आई.डी.एस.), मेगन श्मिट-साने (आई.डी.एस.), और लैला मेहता (आई.डी.एस.) द्वारा दीपक सानन (पूर्व सिविल सर्वेंट, सीनियर विजिटिंग फेलो, सेंटर फॉर पॉलिसी रिसर्च), सुबीर सिन्हा (एस.ओ.ए.एस.), मुराद बानाजी (मिडलसेक्स यूनिवर्सिटी लंदन), रोज एंगोम (ऑक्सफैम इंडिया), ओलिविया तुलोच (एंथ्रोलोजिका), और सैंटियागो रिपोल (आई.डी.एस.) से इनपुट और समीक्षा के साथ एस.एस.एस.ए.पी. के लिए विकसित किया गया था । यह एस.एस.एच.ए.पी. की जिम्मेवारी है ।

Scarcity and uncertainty loom large over the landscape of Kutch, an arid to semi-arid district in western India, where pastoralism has been practised for generations. Despite its clear potential to tackle the dryland dynamics, the tradition of pastoralism in Kutch has been systematically denigrated and marginalised in the district over the years. Drawing on research conducted in eastern Kutch, and along the coast, this article shows how pastoralist communities have been displaced from a range of vital hydric resources – such as mangroves and water sources – in the name of development and conservation. Together, these have accelerated processes of dispossession and exacerbated both 'old' and 'new' resource scarcities.

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

Scarcity is a dangerous idea and has long been a totalising discourse in resource politics and mainstream economics. A large body of work has critiqued the naturalisation of scarcity in discourses of environmental change, and has highlighted problems in how scarcity is conceptualised and the ways in which scarcities are socially and politically generated. Despite this, the ‘scarcity postulate’ – an assumed mismatch between infinitely expanding human desires and finite means to realise them – remains a powerful concept that continues to be deployed and re-deployed in a host of debates concerning environment and natural resources. From the ‘Limits to Growth’ debates that influenced environmental movements in the 1970s, discussions concerning the causes and consequences of the overlapping food, fuel and finance crises of the 2000s to debates concerning climate change, environmental security and militarisation in the Anthropocene, the discursive constellation of scarcity seems always at work. The focus of this special issue is the cross-scalar dynamics of what we identify as a ‘new politics of scarcity’. This new politics is associated with new framings, contestations and entanglements of scarcity that are associated with new configurations of actors, new political economic relations and new spatialities and geographies of resource control and violence. Building on the empirical cases developed in this special issue, we examine the dynamics and the ‘work’ of the new cross-scalar scarcity politics in sustaining elite and capitalist power through justifying resource acquisitions and enclosures, large-scale policy reforms in the name of ‘austerity’ and intensification of extraction whilst politically side-stepping more thorny politics of (re)distribution, mis-appropriation, dispossession and social justice. We conclude by looking at alternative framings and vernacular conceptions of sustainability that challenge dominant scarcity-driven policies and programmes that intensify local exclusions and inequalities.

2021 The Authors This paper provides some of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings being developed in the ongoing TAPESTRY project which is part of the Transformations to Sustainability (T2S) Programme. We debate how the notion of transformation may be conceptualized from ‘below’ in marginal environments that are especially marked by high levels of climate-related uncertainties. We propose the notion of transformation as praxis — where the focus is on bottom-up change, identities, wellbeing and the recovery of agency by marginalized people and explore how ‘patches’ and the ‘marginal’ offer critical conceptual templates to examine whether and how systemic transformative changes are being assembled and effected on the ground by hybrid and transformative alliances. The article concludes by discussing potential challenges of such engagements, alongside pursuing a normative and political approach to T2S.

This paper addresses COVID-19 in India, looking at how the interplay of inequality, vulnerability, and the pandemic has compounded uncertainties for poor and marginalised groups, leading to insecurity, stigma and a severe loss of livelihoods. A strict government lockdown destroyed the incomes of farmers and urban informal workers and triggered an exodus of migrant workers from Indian cities, a mass movement which placed additional pressures on the country's rural communities. Elsewhere in the country, lockdown restrictions and pandemic response have coincided with heatwaves, floods and cyclones, impeding disaster response and relief. At the same time, the pandemic has been politicised to target minority groups (such as Muslims, Dalits), suppress dissent, and undermine constitutional values. The paper focuses on how COVID-19 has intersected with and multiplied existing uncertainties faced by different vulnerable groups and communities in India who have remained largely invisible in India's development story. With the biggest challenge for government now being to mitigate the further fall of millions of people into extreme poverty, the brief also reflects on pathways for recovery and transformation, including opportunities for rural revival, inclusive welfare, and community response. This brief is based on a review of existing published and grey literature, and 23 interviews with experts and practitioners from 12 states in India, including representation from domestic and international NGOs, and local civil society organisations. It was developed for the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform (SSHAP) by Justin Pickard, Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta (IDS), and Mihir R. Bhatt. Some of the cases draw on ongoing research of the TAPESTRY project, which explores bottom-up transformations in marginal environments across India and Bangladesh.

This article explores the convergence of neoliberal development and mangrove conservation in marginal environments, which are becoming the new resource frontiers. We focus on Kutch, a border district in western India and highlight how the contested trajectories of accelerated and aggressive industrialisation and its convergence with state and corporate-led conservation programmes are shaping the social life of mangroves on the Kutchi coast. We focus on the discourses, practices and politics of value-making and un-making that constitute the multiple modalities of repair as mangroves are depleted and securitised simultaneously. Although these trends are augmenting capitalist accumulation on the coast, they are also giving rise to new kinds of alliances that seek to challenge the logic and practice of repair by highlighting the synergistic relationship of coastal communities with their mangrove habitats.