This chapter considers three broad themes that link urbanisation and electricity consumption. First, it looks at urban forms, both in terms of the sprawl or densification of the city and the nature of building envelopes. Second, it focuses on the behaviour of households, especially the adoption of air-conditioning and electric vehicles and the effect they may have on the grid. Third, it examines the initiatives related to grid management itself, discussing the effect of increased but intermittent renewable power and the progress of smart metering and the use of artificial intelligence in grid management. It concludes that in all these, multiple institutions at different levels of government, varying by country, play a significant role. Coordination across these institutions is critical in achieving the desired outcomes. As technology changes, the focus of interventions, whether technical/technological or socio-economic or institutional, would evolve. The critical question is whether there are institutions that can potentially engage with these changes and respond in a manner that is appropriate such that environmental sustainability is improved and climate risks are reduced. As of now, such institutions, even if present, are not active. The challenge of urban climate governance is not just technical, it is also to animate these institutions.
Archives: Book Chapters
Water Disputes and the Environment: Transboundary Dimensions
The chapter presents a historical perspective of India’s transboundary relationships to engage with water disputes and environmental risks. This offers a nuanced understanding of India’s engagement with the narratives about its role as a hydrohegemon and its preference for bilateralism. Additionally, despite the uneven responses to the UN Watercourses Convention, 1997, the evolving water disputes case law shows an encouraging trend of accommodating for climate change and other environmental risks. Building on these strands and the emerging context of transboundary environmental risks surrounding India, the chapter posits that India’s development interests and the collective concerns of transboundary environmental risks in South Asia align. This allows for building a case for an incremental evolution of regional institutional architecture, beginning with a pursuit of disaster resilience in South Asia. The new rationalities of transboundary environmental risks may be the basis for addressing the structural deficiencies and rebuilding the existing dormant regional institutions.
Historicising Development: Colonialisation, Cartography and Explorations in India’s Northeast
Engaging with development as an agenda seeded within the exploitative commercial economy of the colonial period perhaps contributes to asking crucial questions, which shapes the present development dilemmas that regions face. The evolution of the development paradigm for NE India, remains embedded in the Colonialist’s encounter, understanding and vision of NE as an accessible place amidst an “inaccessible” terrain of the Eastern Himalayas, ultimately connected to accessing and extracting natural resources like coal, oil, timber and tea from the NE region. This model of resource-centric colonialism is intricately connected with the colonial “development” that the region witnessed and has been adequately discussed in the existing scholarship.
Such an enactment of governing resources was only facilitated through elaborate cartographic surveys and explorations to reimagine a “wild tribal cul-de-sac” as one of Empire’s most crucial geopolitical hold. “The British, with an eye on resources of the region, began exploiting the land, the forests, the minerals, the agricultural potential…They surveyed the land; fixed village, taluka and district boundaries; fixed land revenue in monetary terms, realisable from the farmers; set up administration; and started laying roads and railways to transport the raw material of the region to be exported abroad.” The chapter looks into explorations, cartographic surveys, mapping and administrative tours as colonial exercises implemented by the Empire to assess and know the region, creating new knowledge about the region itself. The chapter is divided into three sections: colonial cartography and explorations, surveys as machinery of rule and official tours as a colonial tool of governance. It is based on secondary and archival research and locates itself in the colonial nineteenth century.
Critical Review of the Self-Help Group Model for Managing Fecal Sludge Management Services: Implications For Accountability
The Chapter on 10 on “Critical Review of the Self-Help Group Model for Managing Fecal Sludge Management Services: Implications For Accountability” draws on the framework presented in the The World Bank’s World Development Report 2004 in a particular case in Dhenkanal in the state of Odisha to discuss both the pros and cons of engaging community-based organizations such as self-help groups for urban service delivery and in upholding accountability. The analysis finds that while the engagement of community groups as service providers carries employment benefits and also present a potential alternative for service provision in contexts where both public and private sector capacities are weak, this approach may also undermine organizational accountability as the state may find it more difficult to hold community-based groups to account through penalties for poor performance. Key lessons presented are that this model which has been scaled in the state across most urban areas can be sustained to the extent to which governments can invest in building the capacities of the community groups.
Uneven and Combined Development and the Politics of Labour in an Eastern Indian Coalfield: Shifts and Changes from Late Colonialism to Neoliberalism
Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development has been discussed extensively in the literature on extractive industries in the Global South. The debates originated in studies on Latin America but they are equally relevant for any other country of the Global South. In the Indian context, the development of extractive industries such as coal mining rests on, reproduces and constantly re-combines unevenness between India and other countries as well as within the country. This was the case when large-scale industrial mining began in India during the colonial period, primarily for railways, such as the East Indian Railway, and for local industries and export trade (Ghosh 1977). Mining continued to set the trajectory after the country gained Independence in 1947, when the state expanded the extraction of coal to feed its ambitious project of rapid industrialization in the name of ‘development’. Both, the ‘temples of modern
India’ – as the first Prime Minister Nehru called the large integrated steel mills – and the large coal mines were concentrated in the subnational states in central and eastern India, such as Odisha, Jharkhand (formerly part of Bihar) and Chhattisgarh formerly part of Madhya Pradesh) (Das 1992; Adduci 2012; Adhikari and Chhotray 2020). As is well known, the expansion of open-cast coal mines entailed a plethora of environmental degradation as well as the large-scale dispossession and displacement of usually marginal agriculture-based communities and the dismantling of their agrarian structure (Nayak 2020; Noy 2020). The changing industrial policies since Independence also re-created and re-combined unevenness in the labour regimes, first by expanding the formalization of the erstwhile almost exclusively casual mining labour forces and later on by re-informalizing them.
The chapter focuses especially on the question of how the uneven and combined development of India’s coal industry since the late colonial period shaped its labour forces. As Kasmir and Gill (2018), as well as others (cf. Herod 1997), emphasise Trotsky’s notion in understanding these questions, the theoretical concept of uneven and combined development is particularly helpful for that purpose, because it conceptualises unevenness as emerging from struggles between capital and labour, and hence focuses also on the role that labour plays in the process, not only capital.
Taking as an example the Talcher coalfields in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, where the author conducted ethnographic research between 2015 and 2020, the chapter shows how uneven and combined development has led to the fragmentation of the local labour forces along the way. It argues that the character of unevenness and their combination has changed from the late colonial to the current neoliberal period and that these changes are reflected in labour formations as well as labour politics in the Talcher coalfields.
State’s Commitment to Environmental Governance in India: Struggle Between Developmental Pressure and Sustainability Challenges
Over the last 50 years since environmentalism first exploded onto the world political agenda, the environment has been one of the most controversial and rapidly growing areas of public policy. The green movements in North and local grass-root movements in the South countries have elevated the debate for environmental policymaking and governance. Countries in both North and South have enacted several policies and regulations for environmental protection. However, these policies have been criticized due to their superficial protective coverage, absence of concrete measures and poor execution.
Taking these contexts in the background, this chapter has tried to examine the concept and practice of environmental governance in India. It has provided a historical overview of the environmental governance and also highlighted the challenges and opportunities in the different spheres of environmental decision making by taking some examples. Methodologically, the paper would be based on a path-dependent analysis of the environmental governance in India. This chapter argues that balance in the environment-development trade-off is necessary to meet growth objectives and the enforcement measures do not necessarily obstruct the growth. Further, more public engagement as well as creative politics are required for better environmental decision making.
Climate Governance and Federalism in India
About the chapter
The chapter puts forward a synthetic account of the forces shaping climate governance in India’s federal architecture, building on descriptions of environmental federalism (Arora and
Srivastava 2019; Chakrabarti and Srivastava 2015; Huang and Gupta 2014); state
actions in climate policy (Dubash and Jogesh 2014; Jorgensen et al. 2015; Kumar
2018); and several recent policy moves by both the Centre and states. It describes India’s federal architecture and environmental governance processes before showing how the federal system is adapting to the climate challenge. The chapter also reflects on the inherent vulnerabilities of this form of climate governance.
About the book
This volume brings together leading experts to explore whether federal or decentralised systems help or hinder efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It reviews the opportunities and challenges federalism offers for the development and implementation of climate mitigation and adaptation policies and identifies the conditions that influence the outcomes of climate governance. Including in-depth case studies of 14 different jurisdictions, this is an essential resource for academics, policymakers and practitioners interested in climate governance, and the best practices for enhancing climate action.
Beginning a Conversation on Chinese Urbanization
The scale and variety of Chinese urbanization can overwhelm attempts at analysis. This paper is an exploratory attempt to relate broader patterns of economic transformation in India and China. It addresses specific issues related to various aspects of urbanization, responding largely to issues raised by Zongyong Wen (chapter 5 in this volume). It then situates the specific model of urban transformation described by Zuojun Yang (chapter 6 in this volume) in an Indian comparative context before concluding with an agenda for future conversations, drawing on Brian McGrath (chapter 7 in this volume), which emphasizes the importance of the specificity of the Indian and Chinese urban experience.
Bring Back the Curbs on Political Incorrectness
The book opens with an essay by Stephen Hartman, editor and ringleader of this volume, who partnered with over forty authors from six continents in multidisciplinary and multigenerational teams. Each of the six projects that follow explores a stylistic and thematic manner of reading and responding-to a psychoanalytic text challenging the field to write outside the standardized edition.
Hartman gave each team a Dimen text as muse and a format to write in. Beyond that, experimentation was the mission and Dimen’s pleasure in crafting the page granted permission to play. Responding to six original texts (republished here) with notes, short fiction, dialogue, blog entries, commentary rethought via performance, and group authorship, we travel forty years with Dimen: from, Politically Correct / Politically Incorrect—Redux and Revise; On Money, Love, and Hate; Talking about Sexuality and Suffering or the Eew! Factor: What’s a Nice Vanilla Analyst to Do?; Wild Times / Wild Analysis / Wild Revolution; Rotten Apples – Talking about It/Them/Us; arriving at, Of Ghosts and Groups.
Among Us and in the mixing of us, as an homage to Dimen’s quest to engage the personal and the political in the author’s craft, and in collaboration with Dimen’s endeavour to foster revolution across the psychosocial landscape that renders psychoanalysis its field, the authors undergo a wild analysis of reading and writing.
Experimenting with Urban–Rural Partnerships for Sustainable Sanitation in India: Learning from Practice
Local government partnerships for producing services are ubiquitous in many countries. However, the approach has rarely been applied in India—likely owing to a history of centralized planning and independent urban and rural governance systems. Nonetheless, the country’s transforming sanitation landscape could benefit from intergovernmental partnerships for scaling services with speed and efficiency. The ongoing national sanitation program has espoused the approach in theory but the body of practice to support its wide deployment is sparse. This paper critically reviews one of the first experiments with the approach for producing sanitation services in the Dhenkanal district, Odisha, India. We ask the question: what can Dhenkanal’s case tell us about the challenges and opportunities for delivering sanitation services through local-level intergovernmental urban–rural partnerships in India? As part of our practice research, we supported the district government pilot the approach. The data, consultations, and observations underpinning the experiment form the basis of our insights. We find that the urban–rural partnership increased access to sanitation services among rural households within a short period, lowered service charges, and clarified institutional responsibilities. The experiment highlighted issues relating to planning, responsibility, accountability, and financing that need tackling in order to strengthen the model going forward. We recommend that evolving a definitive model(s) of intergovernmental partnerships would require experimenting with the approach in diverse institutional contexts and granting governments the flexibility to recreate and renegotiate the form of the partnership.