Shared survival and cooperation in India and Australia

Abstract

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to ‘survive well’, securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place-based cooperatives while other things connect them: an Earth unsettled by climate change and extractivist/capitalist interventions. Both cooperatives transform place in practice by engaging similar survival strategies and non-exploitative forms of cooperation. In this paper we seek to articulate the transformative nature of these places and practices in a way that goes beyond easy binaries of local/global, while enabling recognition of different affiliations between lands, related climate crisis and sustainable and shared surviving mechanisms. We develop a ‘two-thirds’ perspective building upon Bruno Latour's third attractor, the Terrestrial, together with another third, Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg's idea of the World of the Third (WOT). Their interventions open our thinking to the ecological particularities, uncertainties, and postcapitalist possibilities of surviving well in place.