As Anna Tsing reminds, the natural environment has long been a kind of ‘resource frontier’ both for colonial encounters and contemporary capitalism. We too find capitalism and colonialism – as interlocking extractive forms – productive to think with. 

Each of the three sites are differently oriented with respect to colonialism, providing a unique vantage point on the enduring political, economic and social effects of imperial power. Devon played a distinctive role in England’s status as colonial metropole. For most of the 20th century, Mongolia was in a kind of Soviet auto-colonial situation in which party members and elites were heavily influenced by Moscow. As a former princely state, Sikkim’s governance – its institutions, infrastructures and legal frameworks – were patterned by British colonial rule. In each of these situations, colonial and capitalist processes are intimately linked.

‘Right to Roam’ – shorthand for England’s current public access law which dictates patterns of permissible open swimming – emerged from a particular history of wealth accumulation and land ownership inextricably linked with colonialism. Private estates in Devon have been financially upheld by violent economic extraction, since the 16th century, with landowners profiting from involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation ownership in the Americas and Caribbean, no less than the monetary compensation slave-owning landed gentry received following the abolition of slavery.

As Mongolia transitioned from Soviet-style party state governance towards a multiparty parliamentary system in the early 1990s, members of the communist party acquired ownership of the majority of state resources. With the concurrent and rapid transition from centrally planned to market economy, ‘the country was promoted as a resource pool for global markets’ (Sneath and Munkherdene 2018) even as the Constitution stipulates that Mongolia’s natural resources are public property belonging to the people. This leaves many Mongolians wondering how the country’s politicians and elites continue to line their pockets from mega-mining projects (Jargalsaihan 2026).

Development projects in contemporary Sikkim tend to bear the blueprints from the state’s British colonial past. For example, elites harnessed the hydropower of the Teesta river during the colonial period for building the kind of infrastructure needed for imperial expansion (Mohora 2025). As India liberalised and joined the globally integrated market in the 1990s, mega-power projects came on the horizon. Now at least 20 large dams and hydropower projects line the Teesta River, which is sacred for Lepcha ethnic communities.

In Tibetan texts, Sikkim has long been portrayed as a verdant, therapeutic hinterland. This has had material effects for centuries, as Sikkim has been critical for the production of plant-based medicines harnessed by Tibetan Medicine, an expanding industry in recent decades.  In Mongolia, the dominant Soviet political culture of the 20th century impacted understandings of the natural environment (baigal; baigaliin orchin) as a romanticised and benevolent ‘mother nature’ primed to heal the human body. In the United Kingdom, popular interpretations of Dartmoor as ‘wild’ emerged from nineteenth-century literary representations of a desolate moorland, which romanticised the region as a place where nature was powerful and untouched.

While many – if not all – of the water-based therapeutic practices that our research engages are not ‘new’, we find that the globally-circulating concept of ‘wellbeing’ impacts them. As open swimming, mineral spring treatments and hot spring bathing are increasingly thought to provide wellbeing – understood variably as ‘living well’ in community with others – this has shifted their meanings and associated values, and with socio-political, economic and environmental effects. Mineral spring sanatoria in Mongolia, constructed during the state socialist period, increasingly resemble Western spas today, reflected in the treatments offered and their prices. Hot spring bathing in Sikkim is marketed for its stress-relieving, immunity-boosting, and detoxifying effects: framings that resonate with transnational wellbeing discourse. The rise in popularity of ‘wild’ swimming in England accompanies greater visibility of its wellbeing benefits. In recent post-pandemic years, historic and natural environments have been increasingly framed as supplementing ‘overstretched health and social care providers’ (Lunt, 2019, xix) with £5.77m dedicated nationally to ‘green social prescribing’ in 2022-23.

At all three field sites, visitor economies are expanding in recent years. In Devon, overcrowding at popular swimming sites, littering, and destroying wildlife habitats are increasingly reported. Mineral springs in Mongolia are undergoing a similar threat of misuse from visitors. In some situations, hired by the local government, residents have become care-takers in monetised access schemes. Green tourism in Sikkim is increasingly fostered by the state, resulting in a changing composition of users of hot springs: local pilgrims, pilgrims from further afield and abroad as well as non-Sikkimese tourists. In all three field sites, the question of who is truly ‘local’ is an unresolved tension and inflects questions of who should make decisions about how the land is used, and who has a right to be there.

Transcending a ‘West-Rest’ binary and provincialising the global north (Chakrabarty 2000), our project focuses on global processes that localise in distinctive ways. By telling a trans-regionally interconnected story about the factors and forces that lead to social exclusion, our project disrupts narrative ‘grooves of thinking’ (Wertsch 2021, 85) that tend to cluster around single regional approaches or unitary schools and styles of thought.