Displaced Burdens: Ecological Cost Displacement, Social Stratification and the Distributive Politics of Green Transitions in India

1. Introduction

India aims to achieve about 50 per cent of its cumulative installed electric power capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030, 45 per cent reduction in the emissions intensity of its GDP from 2005 by 2030 and achieve its target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070. Very few would argue that a less carbon-intensive energy system is needed. But the social meaning of these commitments is found not so much in the total environmental impacts of these commitments as in the distribution of these impacts. Solar parks require land and electric vehicles require lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, while the transition away from coal represents a challenge for the livelihoods of areas that have been organized around coal for more than a century. Who pays, where and how much who says is thus raised with every step towards decarbonisation.

This article begins with a puzzle as how do policies and technologies aimed at reducing environmental degradation create, redistribute or leave unaddressed other environmental and social inequalities? There are two easy answers, but they aren’t good enough. The first one is linked to the process of ecological modernisation and sees these as frictions in the transition that will be solved by better technology and governance (Mol & Spaargaren, 2000). The second, which can be found in part of the essential work, sees the green transition as being nothing more than a new field of accumulation that always replicates injustice. The first doesn’t account for why it is that the burdens of transition so often land on disadvantaged groups. The second does not cover situations where the transition will decrease exposure to harm, such as occurs when cleaner household fuels or lower city air pollution is brought about.

The argument presented here identifies three processes that are frequently performed concurrently. Environmental improvement is a quantitatively specified decrease in a specific environmental stress. Ecological cost displacement occurs when environmental costs are shifted from one location to another, one population to another, or from one production stage to another and/or from one time to another. Distributive injustice is any imbalance or unfair process in the distribution of harms, costs or benefits of transitions. These processes may take place simultaneously, but they are conceptually distinct: There can be an improvement without displacement, and displacement does not necessarily have to be unfair if burdens are shared, compensated and agreed upon. The question becomes conditional, then: When is environmental improvement a displacement and when is displacement unjust?

The article has three contributions. It first summarizes the concepts most closely related to ecological cost displacement (cost-shifting, ecologically unequal exchange, environmental inequality formation, sacrifice zones and green cost shifts), and finds out what is still not explained. Secondly, it suggests that the boundary is displacement dependent, that is, improvement is measured within a certain accounting boundary, costs are accrued beyond that boundary, and the social location of the boundary determines whose costs are included. Third, it connects displacement to recognition, claiming that conflicts over sustainability are conflicts between ways of knowing nature, just as Moharaj and Balabantaray (2026b) have argued, that what is considered a cost is a function of whose knowledge is privileged. Four propositions specify mechanisms, conditions and the evidence needed to assess them.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Environmental Justice: Distribution to Recognition

Environmental justice research started with the unequal placement of hazardous facilities in the United States (Bullard, 2018) and has expanded from a distributive approach to a procedural and recognition approach (Schlosberg, 2007; Walker, 2012). Maldistribution tends to be linked to the misrecognition that groups whose identities, knowledge, and modes of life are devalued are also those who are excluded from decision making and will suffer from outcomes, according to Schlosberg (2009) following the work of Fraser (2013). The three dimensions (Jenkins et al., 2016; Sovacool & Dworkin, 2015) have been employed in energy-justice scholarship. Normative clarity is the strength of this tradition. It’s limitation, for these purposes, is that it looks at the prevalence of harm at a particular point in time, but not at how harm flows. Pellow’s (2000) concept of environmental inequality formation, which conceptualizes inequality as a process with various stakeholders that plays out over the life cycle of a product, offers part of the answer in this regard but was designed for ‘toxic production’ not for transitions that have positive aggregate environmental outcomes.

2.2. The Ecological Distribution Conflicts

Political ecology places the environmental change in the context of power and property relations. Martinez-Alier (2002) demonstrates that many resource conflicts are ‘environmental distribution conflicts’, in which the poor fight for their livelihoods, which depend directly on land, water and forest. This tradition has been keystone to Indian scholarship. In contrast to post-material environmentalism in the North, Guha and Martinez-Alier (2013) identified and discussed the environmentalism of the people living in the global South based on their livelihoods, and Baviskar (1999) and Padel and Das (2010) showed how large dams and mining brought about changes in the lives of the Adivasis in the name of national development. The invisibility of land uses was demonstrated by Baka (2013) who showed that classification of land as ‘wasteland’ allowed it to be taken over for energy plantation in Tamil Nadu. Hence, the key lesson for this article from political ecology is that costs do not just happen, they are being created by classifications that determine what is valuable.

2.3. Treadmill, Metabolic Rift and Unequal Exchange

Capitalist growth demands ever more withdrawals from and additions to ecosystems (Schnaiberg, 1980) and environmental reform is likely to be subsumed by the imperative of capitalist accumulation (Gould, Pellow & Schnaiberg, 2008). The degradation of the conditions of production of capital is a ‘second contradiction’ (O’Connor 1998), and Marx’s analysis of a ‘metabolic rift’ (Marx 1999) was reconstructed. Clark and York (2005) have continued the metabolic analysis by applying it to carbon, and world-systems scholars of the ecologically unequal exchange have demonstrated how trade enables core economies to take environmental space in peripheral economies (Rice, 2007; Bunker, 1985). The wisdom here is that an improvement in one place could be a trade off with a deterioration in another.

2.4. Ecological Modernisation and Its Critics

It is the theory of ecological modernisation that suggests a way of achieving environmental reform without giving up on economic growth by adopting technological innovation, market instruments and institutional learning (Mol & Spaargaren, 2000). This empirical finding that some economies have lessened some pressures and increased is not unimportant, and any criticism has to concede that there is a real improvement in the environment. The theory’s weakness is related to distributive. It focuses on progress based on aggregate indicators and has an implicit expectation that institutions will internalise costs, but few questions as to whether externalising costs in one area is an internalisation in another. At the consumption level, Szasz (2007) makes a similar point in his description of ‘inverted quarantine’: those who have resources take the precaution of shielding themselves from the harmful conditions in the environment without changing the conditions that cause the harm.

2.5. Just Transitions and the Costs of Low-Carbon Change

In its origins, Just-transition scholarship emerged as a demand from the trade-union movement for workers who lost their jobs in high-polluting sectors to not have to bear the burden of environmental policy, but has since expanded to include communities, informal workers and inequalities across the globe (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013; Stevis & Felli, 2015). Recent research explicitly mentions the direct cost-shifting of low-carbon change. Sovacool et al. (2020) report that north and south decarbonisation depend on the exploitation of African mining and the processing of toxic waste in the north, and Sovacool (2021) talks of ‘enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment’ as creating ‘mitigation victims’. Zografos and Robbins (2020) caution about ‘green sacrifice zones’, which are areas where the costs of decarbonisation are shifted. Lerner (2012) refers to the fenceline communities as ‘sacrifice zones’. The notion of cost shifting of itself is not new: Kapp (1953) has claimed that private enterprise systematically imposes social costs on third parties and future generations.

2.6. The Concept of Costs Is Defined with the Consideration of Epistemic Plurality

In these debates, one aspect is still relatively undeveloped: the epistemic. Moharaj and Balabantaray (2026b) discuss the epistemological conflicts in environmental sociology, proposing a critical rethinking of mainstream approaches to knowing and governing nature and emphasising other forms of ecological knowledge, local knowledge, and alternative forms of living with the more-than-human world. They share notions of ecological pluriversality and convivial ecologies, as well as with the recognition dimension of environmental justice, which Escobar (2018) calls for. For the present argument their contribution is specific. When there are multiple ways of knowing nature, there are multiple ways of measuring the costs of nature. A grazing commons that is considered unproductive land, a sacred grove that is treated as a mineral block, a river that is only considered to be useful for cooling water, etc., aren’t merely misallocated they’re misknown.

Other research of the same author is compatible in the same direction. In their systematic review of cleaner-production adoption, Moharaj and Balabantaray (2026a) identify a lack of research on social dimensions (governance arrangements, behavioural change, cultural considerations and policy frameworks) compared to technological and economic dimensions, with a greater focus in the global North than in the South. Dalei and Balabantaray (2026) report on a household study conducted in Himachal, India, which indicates that the exposure to extreme weather and its impacts on agriculture are present in various ecological regions and without any mitigation policy, their vulnerability to climate change is already unevenly distributed. Balabantaray (2023a, 2023b) in his reviews on gendered climate vulnerability and environmental leadership of women respectively warn against assuming homogeneity among any ‘affected community’.

2.7. Research Gap

Environmental justice is not a definition of the transfer of costs but rather a description of its outcomes. Theories of movement, such as the treadmill, metabolic-rift and unequal exchange theories, are usually macro scale and assume inevitability. Studies on Just Transition and green-sacrifice zones refer to cost shifts in low-carbon transition, but they tend to be vague about when and how costs are shifted and seldom address the epistemic process involved in determining costs. Ecological cost displacement is here taken to mean the redistribution of environmental costs (degradation, threat, loss of access or the need for adaptation) from one place, one social group, one stage of a production chain or one time to another place, another social group, another stage of a production chain or another time, as a result of an action that lowers a cost elsewhere. There are four axes of displacement that can be identified: spatial (between regions), social (between groups, classes, castes or occupations), sectoral or chain-based (between stages of extraction, manufacture, use and disposal), and temporal (between present and future).

3. Conceptual Framework

3.1. Re-Labeling of a Tried-and-True Concept?

The phenomenon, which is described in the following three cases or by the three concepts, is related. Kapp (1953) speaks of cost-shifting, Zografos and Robbins (2020) of green cost shifts, and Sovacool (2021) of the victims of mitigation. The concept can only be informative if it clarifies something that those terms leave unclear. It does so in three respects. First, it demands that there be both real improvement and displacement; it is not cost-shifting in Kapp’s sense in that the intervention in question is environmentally beneficial on balance. Second, it separates the three ways in which the same type of burden can be relocated, converted or deferred. This is an environmental cost moved to another location (for example, mining’s impact moving upstream in a supply chain), an environmental cost converted into a different social cost (for example, a land-use change that becomes a livelihood loss), and an environmental cost deferred (for example, battery waste that will not occur until the end of a vehicle’s life). Third and most importantly, it places the mechanism in accounting boundaries.

3.2. Boundary-Dependence

Each promise of green improvement comes with a boundary, whether it is a national assessment of GHGs, an estimate of air quality data from a city, a life cycle assessment of a project, or a sustainability report from a company. If the cost of the project is not in the boundary in which the project is approved as an improvement, the Project is a displacement. This is not only a technical issue. Institutions set boundaries, and they correspond to social boundaries: territorial emissions inventories exclude emissions embodied in imports; environmental impact assessment is limited to certain projects and not others; air quality monitoring is focused in cities. When the limits of measurement are the limits of political voice, those who are outside of those limits do not get two chances to lose; they lose first as payers of costs to the system and they lose again as people whose losses, if they happen, are not counted. It is from here that the epistemic dimension emphasized by Moharaj and Balabantaray (2026b), namely definition of boundary as a particular way of knowing nature, mostly in a way where nature is understood as an input for livelihoods or cultural worlds, and not as land, water and minerals.

3.3. From Displaced to Unjust

Under certain recognisable circumstances displacement turns to injustice. It is distributively unjust if the burden is imposed on the basis of preexisting inequalities or divisions (caste, tribe, class, gender, region) and a transition merely exacerbates the existing disadvantage. It is not fair from a procedural point of view if those who pay the costs vote on something without having any influence on the decision. It includes misrecognition, where their knowledge and values are not included in what is defined as costs and benefits. On the other hand, displacement could be justifiable if burdens are shared, if burdens are compensated for in ways that restore livelihoods instead of cash, if affected groups have real power in the processes of agreeing to displacement.

This framework distinguishes four types of inequality that the literature tends to mix up: inequality due to background production and consumption patterns (including fossil fuel pollution); inequality produced by the institutions that are used to manage the transition to reform (who is deciding and how?); inequalities created by the new or displaced technologies needed to implement low-carbon transitions (new inequalities/displaced inequalities); and inequalities that could be reduced by the transition (e.g. cleaner air, safer jobs, more energy available). The four must be considered in a defensible account.

4. Methodology

This is a critical narrative review with secondary evidence analysis. Theoretical literature was selected based on purpose sampling, which aimed at getting the most representative literature from the various streams of environmental sociology and political economy pertaining to environmental cost distribution. Information from Indian sources was obtained from government policy documents, reports from international agencies, and peer-reviewed studies. Three cases were chosen on a theoretical basis to capture the broadest possible range of the modality and axis of displacement: the transition of the solar utility industry (where land-use change is a key displacement issue and livelihood loss is the dominant issue), the transition of the coal industry (where livelihood loss is the key displacement issue and land-use change is a significant one), and the transition of the electric-vehicle battery chain (where relocation along a supply chain and deferral to end-of-life are key displacement issues). Other potential areas, such as industrial decarbonisation and water use, are mentioned in only as much as they help to illuminate the cases.

The analysis is descriptive. It is based on existing data and research and does not include original fieldwork, interviews or statistical estimates. Where there is little evidence (for a number of areas of the India battery supply chain), there is a gap that is identified by inference. The case approach does not portray all Indian transitions, but rather it is used to identify mechanisms and to propose propositions for further testing.

5. Findings and Analysis

5.1. Utility Scale solar Parks

For utility scale solar, the aim is to replace coal fired generation and therefore emissions and air pollution in the area. Central and state schemes encourage the development of solar parks to increase the supply of large land areas at reduced cost to the developer. It was observed that land reclassified as government ‘wasteland’ was used for grazing and other common property resource activities and that their conversion had a negative impact on pastoralists’ and landless people’s livelihoods (Yenneti, Day & Golubchikov, 2016). Similarly, Stock and Birkenholtz (2021) demonstrate how solar parks have the potential to redefine agrarian labour relations, involving the owners of the land leasing it out and generating rent, whereas the labourers lose agricultural jobs. The results are consistent with Baka’s (2013) study about the political character of wasteland.

The case illustrates conversion. The environmental costs of the project are minor or insignificant, since the land is deemed to be unproductive. Its social cost seems to be in the form of loss of grazing rights, of opportunities to generate income from fuel or labour, but disproportionately on those who have customary rights to land which are not formalised in a title. Electricity is distributed far from where it’s generated, rents generated for landowners and the state, and little permanent jobs generated in the area following construction. In terms of procedures, the safeguards provided in the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, such as social impact assessment, may not be applicable in the process of leasing or in the process of classification of land as state-owned, thereby limiting the formal standing of the most affected groups.

There’s a limit to evidence. The best documented are a few large parks and outcomes seem to be influenced by previous land ownership, level of use by commons, and the nature of the leasing arrangements. If the land is being voluntarily leased by landowners on fair terms or if solar is being integrated with agriculture, the distributive outcome can be much improved. It is not demonstrated in the case that solar energy is a negative impact on rural communities, it is only demonstrated that the classification of land determines whether the conversion is considered a cost.

5.2. Decarbonisation and the Coal Region

The coal economy is more or less concentrated in the eastern and central part of the country, particularly Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, where the Adivasi population is high. The environmental goal in reducing coal consumption is evident, namely the reduction of emissions and the smaller amount of local air, water and land pollution. But it is important here to understand the background distribution of environmental inequality. Coal regions have been paying the price of mining for years - displacement, subsidence, polluted water and degraded forests and the electricity and money has been elsewhere (Lahiri-Dutt, 2014; Padel & Das, 2010). Switching away from coal will bring environmental benefits just where it has been needed the most.

The distributive issue is one of adjustment. Coal provides the public sector companies with formal jobs, contract jobs, jobs in the transport and ancillary industry, an informal sector coal collection and sale (Lahiri-Dutt & Williams, 2005), and significant state revenues and district level funds. These dependencies, not formal mining employment, have been the subject of policy research to outline transition risk in districts like Jharkhand. Some coal states could become as prosperous as the solar industry, in theory, according to Pai et al. (2020), but these new jobs do not necessarily have to be in the same districts or be awarded to the same people.

The transition of each group will be unique. There are certain public-sector workers who are on a contract, there are certain public-sector workers who are informal, and they don’t have the same rights as permanent workers, who have pensions and bargaining power. Households that were stripped of land due to the mining may end up forfeiting the jobs that were offered to them as compensation, but not receiving the land back. The labour contribution of women in coal collection and related activities is often not included in labour statistics. The District Mineral Foundation established via the amendment to the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 2015, which was meant to allocate a portion of mining revenues to the affected areas, can be used as a way to access transition finance, albeit its ability to reach affected groups has been doubted. The case is therefore an instance of two kinds of displacement: temporal (historical displacement costs not being covered) and social (the possibility that the adjustment costs are borne by the least protected workers). It also reveals that the transition can diminish inequality if it involves the restoration of the land, social protection and local economic diversification, which means that the end of coal can diminish exposure to environmental harm experienced by historically affected regions.

5.3. Relocation and Deferral of Electric-Vehicle Battery Chain

Electric vehicles have no tailpipe emissions and low city air pollution and their life cycle emissions are dependent on the carbon intensity of electricity. They need critical minerals that are associated with environmental and social hazards in their extraction and processing. The Ministry of Mines, Government of India, 2023, identified 30 critical minerals and in 2023, the Geological Survey of India indicated a lithium inferred resource in Reasi district, Jammu and Kashmir. However, at this time, there is much reliance on minerals and processed battery materials imports, meaning much of the upstream burden is carried by other countries, an example of ecologically unequal exchange in the sense of Rice (2007), and the ‘decarbonisation divide’ in the sense of Sovacool et al. (2020).

There are thus two types of displacement. If the costs of relocation are not accounted as part of the territory of India, then policies that encourage the use of domestic mineral resources can integrate these costs within the territory of India, even within forested areas and Adivasi dominated areas that are already impacted by mining. Deferral postpone costs to the end of the product life. The Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022, institutionalised EPR for batteries but the waste economy in India is still mostly informal, and to what degree will the formal rules apply in practice remains to be seen. The evidence here, as in the other cases, is less complete than in others: most Indian battery manufacturing is still in its infancy and much of the research on the labour and environmental impacts of batteries has never been published in peer-reviewed journals. General risks for mining and recycling should not be interpreted as specific risks. What is clear is that the institutions that are being (re)designed will decide whether costs are shifted into or out of the country, whether they are concentrated in the mining area or whether they are transferred to informal waste workers.

5.4. Comparative Analysis

The three cases are summarised in Table 1. Together, they demonstrate that an environmental objective can be achieved in a variety of distributive ways, and that displacement is a predictable process in which costs are placed where measurement is least likely to be seen and voice is least likely to be heard.

There are 3 patterns that stand out. Firstly, the kind of displacement varies: conversion happens in solar parks, temporal and social displacement in coal regions, and relocation and deferral in the battery chain. Second, in both scenarios the accounting scope of the improvement excludes the main cost, which is grid emissions in the first, and national inventories in the second.Second, the main cost in each is not included in the accounting scope of the improvement, that is, grid emissions in the first case, and national inventories in the second. Thirdly, the groups affected are not the same – they are those who claim on the basis of customary use, informal work or unrecognised knowledge. The benefits would accrue to land-titled farmers who lease their land to solar developers, permanent coal workers, and formal-sector battery workers, while informal coal workers and informal recyclers would pay the expenses. It is not only by income, it’s by claim to resources also.

6. Theoretical Propositions

P1 (boundary mechanism). The larger the difference between the spatial, social and temporal scope of the environmental effects of a transition and the accounting boundary within which its environmental improvement is certified, the greater the likelihood that costs will be shifted outside of that boundary. Condition can be measured by territorial or project level indicators and indicates improvement. Evidence needed: comparison of projects/policies with varying assessment boundaries (e.g., with and without life cycle costing or social impact assessment) and tracking the costs that are captured.

P2 (classification mechanism). Displacement is more likely to turn into distributive injustice if official land and resource categorizations deliberately ignore customary and common property rights uses, which do not have a cost recorded in land conversion and, therefore, are not considered in terms of costs. Commons and Customary Rights: Recognition of commons and customary rights is weak, and the Forest Rights Act, 2006, and Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 have not been fully implemented. Evidence - comparison of outcomes by site, based on land records and published field studies, across sites with different tenure in the commons and recognition of commons.

P3 (protection mechanism). If affected groups are those who are formally employed in a declining fossil-fuel sector, adjustment costs will be borne more heavily by affected workers and households who are not formally employed in those sectors. Challenge: large informal and contract workforces and fiscal reliance on extractives. Evidence needed: longitudinal household and labour-market data on coal districts pre and post mine closure, by formal, contract and informal workers, by gender and social group.

P4 (reduction mechanism). When green transitions address historical burdens, social protection of the least protected and the power to decide the allocation of benefits for affected groups, they can reduce inequality. Indicators: provision of dedicated transition finance, local governance, and local ecological knowledge recognised. Evidence needed: comparison of regions or projects with and without such arrangements, changes in exposure to environmental harm, livelihood security and participation.

7. Discussion

7.1. Contribution to Environmental Sociology

The framework is a point of contribution to environmental sociology in three ways. First, it combines two literatures that seldom speak to one another, namely that of ecological modernisation (taking environmental improvement seriously) and that of political ecology and treadmill theory (taking distribution seriously). It approaches improvement and displacement as two distinct but simultaneous processes, neither of which assumes its is a desirable or inevitable end, nor the other that it is not. Secondly, boundary-dependence defines a process in which displacement happens and provides a framework for comparing projects and policies. Third, it is a move to connect cost accounting with recognition and thus expand Moharaj and Balabantaray (2026) argument around the subject of ecological pluriversality, which is not only epistemological but also about what constitutes as loss.

Relationship to other concepts helps to understand the contribution and limits. Green sacrifice zones (Zografos & Robbins, 2020) identify costs bearing locations and ecological cost displacement identifies the axes, the modalities and the conditions of the cost displacement. This framework builds on a processual approach to environmentally desirable transitions, while the processes of environmental inequality formation (Pellow, 2000) are related to processes of inequality in toxic production. Sovacool’s (2021) mechanisms of enclosure, exclusion/encroachment and entrenchment explain how victims of these extreme weather events are made; the boundary and classification mechanisms describe why these victims often go uncounted.

7.2. Policy Implications

Environmental assessment should be beyond the accounting scope of the improvement to include supply chains, end-of-life etc. and livelihood effects of land-use change. Before land is dedicated to renewable energy, commons and customary uses of the land should be recognised. Just transition planning for coal dependent areas should focus on groups affected by dependence, not just those who are employed, and should involve remediation of past environmental justice harms. Including any affected group in a decision-making process may not be enough; it is important for that group to have real power in the process of decision and over decision outcomes. Balabantaray (2023a, 2023b) argues that to include this, women should be explicitly part of this participation, as their labour and ecological knowledge are traditionally unrecorded.

7.3. Limitations

The framework has some drawbacks. It is based on secondary information, which is not consistent across cases, especially the case in the battery-chain. The cases are not necessarily representative and the propositions are empirical. The idea of displacement is based on the assumption that costs can be attributed, some ecological costs are diffuse or uncertain and attribution of specific harms to specific transitions can be tricky. The framework also has the potential to be simplistic, assuming that affected communities are only passive. In reality, however, they negotiate, resist or even gain from transitions, and their reactions may alter the burden of costs. Last but not least, because of India’s focus, it is difficult to generalise.

8. Conclusion

This article has emphasized that the social impacts of green transitions are not just a matter of their ecological effectiveness, but also of the allocation of their ecological costs, as well as of their economic opportunities and decision-making and adjustment burdens. Relocation, conversion and deferral are forms of ecological cost displacement and understanding these mechanisms helps to account for why a transition that yields better aggregate environmental outcomes can at the same time regenerate and/or aggravate inequality. Displacement is injustice when it happens along pre-existing lines of stratification, when there is no voice of the affected groups, and when their knowledge of nature is not included in costs. It does not have to be a foregone conclusion: Transitions can help to lessen inequality where they are used to address past inequalities, to safeguard the most vulnerable and to distribute power.

Research needs for future studies include comparative analysis of renewable energy projects and their tenure and evaluation frameworks, longitudinal analysis of coal dependence in coal-producing areas that differentiates formal and informal coal dependence, and supply-chain studies of the growing battery and critical-mineral industries in India. It should also explore the varying conceptions of nature knowledge and its implication on the concept of environmental costs in practice and the intersection of environmental justice.