Climate Brides: (Un)Tying the knots between climate change and child marriage

Abstract

Although both climate change and child marriage have received sustained policy and research attention, their intersection remains critically underexplored. This article examines how climate stress—arising from rapid-onset disasters and slow-onset processes such as drought and salinisation, and intensified by displacement and weak governance—reshapes marriage practices in South Asia, where climate vulnerability and gendered precarity converge with particular intensity. Drawing on ethnographic research in drought-affected western India and case studies from the Indo-Bangladesh border, southern India, and Afghanistan documented through the Climate Brides project, the paper traces how child marriage functions as an infrastructure of adaptation—a mechanism for redistributing labour, debt, and care under conditions of crisis. Across cases—from Gate-Cane weddings in Maharashtra to trafficking-linked unions in the Sundarbans, post-tsunami marriages in Tamil Nadu, and Toyana exchanges in Afghan displacement camps—early and forced marriage emerge not as cultural residues but as adaptive, if extractive, responses to livelihood erosion and the retreat of state support. Using feminist political ecology and social reproduction theory, the article calls for interdisciplinary, justice-oriented approaches that recognise child marriage as part of the gendered infrastructures of climate adaptation.