One of the most urgent challenges facing the world today is ensuring local water security under rapid climate variability and change. This is of particular importance in a country like India, where over half of the people are involved in farming, and agricultural losses due to climate change are estimated to be as high as 30 per cent by 2080. This ethnography in the arid village of Bhiwadi, West Rajasthan empirically links the reintroduction of local water harvesting technologies with the building of sustainable social reproduction in subsistent communities.

Global policies and instruments to tackle climate change look very different once translated into domestic programmes of action, reflecting varied institutional capacity, competing priorities, and diverse political cultures and political economies. In light of these variations, this article analyses how clean energy is governed in India, both through and beyond the Clean Development Mechanism. Governance processes are assessed across a number of scales, including various actors involved in mobilising finance and providing political and institutional support for clean energy.