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

Green transitions are usually assessed by their environmental effectiveness: whether they reduce emissions, pollution or resource use. Their social consequences, however, depend on something else as well: how ecological costs, economic opportunities, decision-making power and adjustment burdens are distributed. This article asks why policies and technologies designed to reduce environmental degradation can create, redistribute or leave unresolved other forms of environmental and social inequality. It develops ecological cost displacement as a provisional concept and distinguishes it from environmental improvement and from distributive injustice. Drawing on environmental justice, political ecology, treadmill-of-production and metabolic-rift theory, ecologically unequal exchange and just-transition scholarship, it argues that displacement is boundary-dependent. Improvement is certified within an accounting boundary, such as a national emissions inventory or a project’s carbon balance, while costs accumulate outside it. Displacement becomes injustice when it travels along existing lines of stratification and when the knowledge of those who bear the costs is not recognised. A critical narrative review of secondary evidence on three Indian cases (utility-scale solar parks, coal-region decarbonisation, and the electric-vehicle battery chain), shows how costs are relocated, converted and deferred. Four propositions specify the conditions under which transitions reproduce or reduce inequality.