A major contribution to understanding how environmental crisis is viewed by business enterprises and how this can be addressed, offering solutions to global and national anxieties.
This book highlights the manner in which key aspects in policy discourse—commodity, pricing, ownership, and regulation—have borrowed economic and trade principles to address the environmental crisis and to what effect. The book addresses a fundamental issue in environment: if nature is no longer available as a limitless resource, how has the policy discourse on the environmental crisis come to view it, value it, and live with it?
Analysing policy instruments across sectors that respond to local ecological conflicts and challenges, the book offers a conceptual understanding of how natural elements are transformed into mobile, tradable commodities through the use of market-based instruments.
Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.
P. V. Narasimha Rao (or PV as he was popularly known) has been widely praised for enabling the economic reforms that transformed the country in 1991. From the vantage point of his long personal and professional association with the former prime minister, bestselling author Sanjaya Baru shows how PV’s impact on the nation’s fortunes went way beyond the economy.
This book is an insider’s account of the politics, economics and geopolitics that combined to make 1991 a turning point for India. The period preceding that year was a difficult one for India: economically, due to the balance of payments crisis; politically, with Rajiv Gandhi’s politics of opportunism and cynicism taking the country to the brink; and globally, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, its ally.It was in this period that the unheralded PV assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress, took charge of the central government, restored political stability, pushed through significant economic reforms and steered India through the uncharted waters of a post-Cold War world. He also revolutionized national politics, and his own Congress party, by charting a new political course, thereby proving that there could be life beyond the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
1991 marked the end of an era and the beginning of another. It was the year that made PV. And it was the year PV made history.
India’s strong environmental protection norms were meant to reduce the imbalance in negotiating positions between the promoters of industrial projects and those likely to be affected by them. Judged on that metric alone, they have largely met with failure. The effects of the violations of these norms have tended to fall disproportionately on people who suffer from several other forms of deprivation that limit their access to the tools of governance and justice. There remains a vast gap between law and practice, one that often looks insurmountable.
While much can be done to reduce the complexity of governance and make it more accessible, the lasting impact of environmental degradation requires affected communities to take immediate steps. If they wait for law and governance to match the constitutional aspirations of transparency and popular participation, they are likely to suffer irreparable damage to their lives and livelihoods. As successive governments underline the importance of rapid industrialisation, it is vital that affected communities use the tools of law to monitor compliance with environmental norms and also prevent and counter the damage caused by them.
That said, barriers to engagement with environmental governance cannot be wished away. A level of paralegal training may be needed before the tools of environmental law can be effectively used. And given the number of industrial projects coming up all over India, a cadre of people with legal and paralegal training may need to mediate with environmental governance on behalf of affected communities. More than a rigorous knowledge of the black letter of environmental law, this requires a practical understanding of how to use it. Avenues for such practical training in environmental law and governance are unfortunately limited, even for those who are pursuing a law degree full time.
At myLaw, we aim to create scalable solutions to address such gaps that law students and legal practitioners face in their learning. This series of essays by Kanchi Kohli, published on www.myLaw.net between 2014 and 2016, distills her enormous experience of effectively moving the levers of environmental governance while working with affected communities. For those who want to work to secure environmental justice, it contains important lessons that can be used to make the best of the system of Environmental Impact Assessments, compensatory afforestation law, and the land acquisition law, to name just a few. With the release of all the essays together in this document, we are excited that many more people will be able to access and use them to bridge the gap between the law and practice of environmental law.
In 2016 India became the world’s fastest growing large economy, overtaking China. India’s resurgence has renewed global interest in the geopolitical implications of India’s economic rise. Sanjaya Baru’s book explores India’s evolving geoeconomic relations with the West and with Asia, particularly China, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. These essays analyse the influence of business and trade on foreign policy, India’s approach to multilateralism and the relevance of regional trade integration for the Indian economy and South Asia. The essays were written after Baru served a term in the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi as a key advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during India’s negotiation of a civil nuclear energy agreement with the United States. They show the author’s intimate knowledge of India’s external economic policies, acquired from his vantage position as an influential newspaper editor and an advisor to the Prime Minister.
In India, few things open faster than colleges, but few sectors reform more slowly than higher education. Demographic changes, economic growth and integration into the global economy, the rising demand for higher education, and the increase in the number of private colleges have led to a massive expansion in Indian higher education. While challenges of access and cost have been long-standing, much of this expansion has been of dubious quality, the result of sustained and deep regulatory and governance failures.
This book analyses these and other complex challenges facing higher education in India, and suggests possible solutions to some of them. The contributors highlight a range of issues facing higher education today, through a deeply moving account of the decline of a college in north Bihar; discussions on the various types of post-secondary educational institutions—the research university, teaching colleges, and vocational training institutes; initiatives, such as community colleges, to address the problem of skill development in India; and the financing and governance of higher education in India.
The book combines diverse methodologies: ethnography of institutions, case studies and data-based work, to present a complex landscape.
These critical insights into higher education in India will be useful to scholars and researchers in education, political science, sociology, and public policy.
This volume decentres the view of urbanisation in India from large agglomerations towards smaller urban settlements. It presents the outcomes of original research conducted over three years on subaltern processes of urbanisation. The volume is organised in four sections. A first one deals with urbanisation dynamics and systems of cities with chapters on the new census towns, demographic and economic trajectories of cities and employment transformation. The interrelations of land transformation, social and cultural changes form the topic of the “land, society, belonging” section based on ethnographic work in various parts of India (Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). A third section focuses on public policies, governance and urban services with a set of macro-analysis based papers and specific case studies. Understanding the nature of production and innovation in non-metropolitan contexts closes this volume. Finally, though focused on India, this research raises larger questions with regard to the study of urbanisation and development worldwide.
Provides a comprehensive overview of international climate change law offering a perfect introduction to the field for students
Assesses all of the relevant international instruments and conventions dealing with climate change
Explores the intersections between climate change law, human rights law, migration law, and trade law
Provides detailed footnotes and a select bibliography offering references to wider academic sources for advanced study and research
The book brings together insights from academics as well as practitioners, and it covers the waterfront in terms of institutions-from parliament to the RBI, and from the Supreme Court to regulatory agencies. It helps provide a framework for how ordinary Indians can make sense of what is a widely-held notion: that the government in Delhi often does not work the way it should. The book not only offers a diagnosis of the problem, but it offers lessons for how to improve governance in the years to come.
Seeing urban politics from the perspective of those who reside in slums offers an important dimension to the study of urbanism in the global South. Many people living in sub-standard conditions do not have their rights as urban citizens recognised and realise that they cannot rely on formal democratic channels or governance structures.
Through in-depth case studies and comparative research, The Politics of Slums in the Global South: Urban Informality in Brazil, India, South Africa and Peru integrates conceptual discussions on urban political dynamics with empirical material from research undertaken in Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, Chennai, Cape Town, Durban and Lima. The chapters engage with the relevant literature and present empirical material on urban governance and cities in the South, housing policy for the urban poor, the politics of knowledge and social mobilisation. Recent theories on urban informality and subaltern urbanism are explored, and the issue of popular participation in public interventions is critically assessed.
The book is aimed at a scholarly readership of postgraduate students and researchers in development studies, urban geography, political science, urban sociology and political geography. It is also of great value to urban decision-makers and practitioners.
