Transformative environments: climate change uncertainties, marginality and locally driven transformative change in India and Bangladesh

Climate change uncertainties, particularly at the local level, remain one of the central challenges to the sustainability of societies and ecosystems.Despite advances in climate science, significant uncertainties persist regarding the scale, intensity and impacts of climatic change (Dessai and van der Sluijs, 2007; Mehta et al, 2021b), and how these get compounded with other intersecting crises (Leach et al, 2021).These uncertainties are especially pronounced in local contexts, where ecological variability interacts with wider trajectories of sociopolitical and economic change.These challenges also point towards the limitation of incremental approaches to adaptation that are increasingly becoming inadequate because they either reproduce inequalities or lead to maladaptation (Eriksen et al, 2021).Instead, more systemic and transformative forms of change are needed.While uncertainty can heighten anxieties about the future, it can also open up possibilities for reimagining development pathways, altering entrenched power relations, and enabling deep structural and transformative change.Yet, what constitutes 'transformation' remains contested in the literature, and there is limited understanding of how transformative processes unfold and are experienced by local people on the ground.This is particularly true of so called