Communal Sustainability: Mobilizing Social Reproduction Theory for the Study of Sustainability

How do Bengaluru’s middle-class environmentalists envision and enact green practices and communities, and what consequences does this have for the (re)production of inequality in the home and the city? This talk will draw on interviews, participant observation and community-engaged research methods to present detailed case studies of green lifestyle movements and communities articulating around mobility and waste in Bengaluru, India. I develop the term communal sustainability to describe household and neighborhood-based interventions into the city’s waste metabolisms. I show how housewives, retired men, and other unlikely suspects deploy affective and reproductive labor to change household behavior, build small-scale infrastructures, and convene collaborative systems of governance. Examining communal sustainability through the lens of social reproduction theory, I reveal how the socially reproductive labor of middle-class women, the elderly and the working poor produces zero-waste management as a form of sustainability. In its material solutions to environmental problems, communal sustainability mobilizes metabolic divisions of household and community labor that are gendered, classed, and casted. At the same time, I caution that there are limits to seeing communal sustainability solely as a site for the reproduction of material and symbolic difference. What is also operative here is a sense of empowerment, a building of shared identity, and an enactment of politics for those engaged in this work, which cannot be reduced to narrow economism or top-down governmentalization. Rather, under some conditions, communal sustainability, with its metabolic reliance on volunteer effort and manual labor, undermines neoliberal agendas and opens new avenues for political participation by marginalized groups in urban environmental politics. As gendered and caste-based work become also a route to political engagement, the paper reflects critically on the role of households in the broader urban sustainability project.