Spatiotemporal narratives of peri-urban land use dynamics and its political drivers: A geo-spatial mixed methods approach

• Industrialization in Ennore is unauthorized, unsustainable, infringed and unjust • Industrialization and urbanization have decreased the area of wetlands by 89.34% • Subnational government had manipulated 1996-CZMP Map to favour political elites • Manipulation had served political elites’ interests, to favor that of global elites • Peri-urban environmental injustice is caused by regulatory capture by the elites Industrialization, urbanization and population growth are the major drivers behind abominable ‘Land-Use Land-Cover Change (LULCC)’, and the loss of local ecosystem services and environmental quality, at peri-urban interfaces. Such dynamics indicate the need to analyse the LULCC pattern, and explore the political drivers behind unsustainable LULCC. This paper, taking ‘Ennore Peri-Urban Region’ as the study area, has adopted a ‘Geospatial Mixed-Methods Case-Study Approach’ that synergises ‘Quantitative LULCC Analysis’ and ‘Qualitative Political Discourse Analysis’. The quantitative LULCC analysis was performed by utilizing ‘Supervised Image Classification’ and ‘Change Detection Analysis’. Quantitative results have revealed that total area of wetland, waterbody and cropland/shrubland has decreased by 89.34%, 14.43% and 10.61% respectively, in the period 1988-2023. Especially, cropland/shrubland has been severely affected in the core industrial region. Such unsustainable LULCC has occurred due to an intensive peri-urban industrialization, and a gradual peri-urbanization. The area under settlement and dense-vegetation have increased by 507.84% and 3.42%, respectively. Qualitative-political discourse analysis has revealed that such an unsustainable peri-urban LULCC has occurred due to the five-year delay in preparing the ‘Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP)’ and its map, and the unauthorized manipulation of 1996-CZMP Map by the subnational ‘Government of Tamil Nadu’, without the approval of the national ‘Government of India’. Such delay and manipulation had initially favoured the vested interests of political elites, and eventually that of global urban business elites, through regulatory capture by the latter. These indicate an inefficient, unfair, unequitable, unjust, incoherent and non-transparent intergovernmental environmental governance, and a weak public participation in decision-making.