A Trail of Two Cities

Abstract A sensibility that evidences a capacity to adapt to and mitigate the impact of global climate change is key to contemporary state making. Bureaucratic documents are the primary artefacts through which this sensibility is performed. This article follows drains and plastics as two slippery “objects” through which the state performs such climate action in attempts to rationalize the city. Taking Delhi as our context, we critically analyze these two “climate objects” in their bureaucratic lives, following the complex entanglements through which they are made and unmade. After a close reading of the archive, we focus on affective registers such as “anxiety” within a selection of chosen policy documents. This reveals the epistemological uncertainties governing messy objects. Employing an ethnographic sensibility to read bureaucratic documents, this article suggests that climate policy is not a straightforward process. It is instead about considerations other than the climate itself: what is available as data and what can be made into data, drawing attention to the makeshift nature of seemingly formal processes. The informal nature of these formalizations renders invisible some territories of the city. The archive of the bureau invokes a timeless city of regulation, a closed system of rationalization. The clock-time of the climate crisis, the long-term trend of growing numbers in the bastis of Delhi and the rhythms of city governance all run at different speeds. Unpacking the politics of knowledge production in this context becomes key to understanding better how the state attempts to govern slippery climate objects.