Archives: Journal Articles

Sustainable development has always been a compromise formulation that papered over real conflict between environment and development. Twenty years after Rio, the geopolitical climate is far less conducive to easy compromises. Given an embattled North and a rising South, particularly Asia, the language of zero sum conflict rather than positive sum cooperation is likely to prevail. Green growth offers one way to paper over these conflicts yet again, but it would be prudent to resist this temptation. There is incomplete buy-in to the green growth story, and some in the South are also concerned that this narrative will downgrade poverty alleviation and equity considerations from the sustainable development triad of environment, growth and distribution. In this context, Rio+20 can play a positive role by focusing on national and sub-national institutions and embracing a diversity of national political, institutional and legal contexts; seeking to impose uniformity is likely to chafe. Global efforts can play a supporting role by inducing normative change, stimulate national processes, and provide hooks for domestic policy actors. In addition, Rio+20 should ensure that inclusion of the weakest should remain firmly on the agenda. While the conversations may be difficult, Rio+20 will be most productive if it leads to engagement with fraught geopolitical issues than if, once again, these are papered over.

The Uttarakhand disaster invited much criticism, but to say that the state government was unaware of the possibility of such a disaster would be unfair. In 2012 the Uttarakhand Action Plan on Climate Change, based on wide consultations, assessed possibilities and steps needed to avert such disasters. Despite the extensive information provided in the document, it fails to be “implementable” due to issues of financing and bureaucratic initiative among others.

Book Review:

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang translated and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang and Adi Ignatius

This article is primarily a conceptual overview on the theme of a grand strategy for a rising power such as India. The objective is to promote a systematic and structural way of thinking on grand strategy—the dynamic art of relating ends and means. The author identifies and expounds on the major domestic and international variables that will shape India’s grand strategy. Factors such as national ethos, domestic political economy, geopolitical context, nature of economic interdependence, the impact of the nuclear revolution, and the evolving structure of the international system all influence the environment in which Indian power is deployed. The author not only contextualises the impact of these variables but also offers select strategic responses to these multiple factors that will circumscribe an Indian grand strategy.

India’s urbanising middle class is at the brink of an unprecedented increase in residential cooling demand, yet little is understood about the dynamics of changing cooling consumption. Based on empirical analyses, this research examines a set of fundamental questions around India’s cooling transition. How is cooling conceptualised and what cooling strategies do households use? How, when and why are people purchasing and using their air conditioners (ACs)? Who is buying energy-efficient ACs? Is cooling consumption gendered? Using descriptive statistics, machine learning, and regression analysis to characterize AC usage, we examine a sample dataset that is representative of areas in Delhi with above average AC penetration. We unpack perceptions of thermal comfort, and characterize the conditions under which households have greater AC use and make energy efficient purchase choices. AC usage is found to be a function of household habits (such as exposure to ACs in the workplace or schools), structural factors, and socio demographic features. While most ACs are in the middle energy-efficiency range, preferences, behaviors and awareness around energy efficiency are found to affect AC use as well as influence the purchase of more efficient ACs. Notable gender differences are observed, and women are found to be less involved in decision-making around cooling appliances and less aware of the technical know-how or energy-efficient schemes. Policy recommendations for a low-carbon cooling trajectory are discussed.

This article seeks to understand the puzzling disjuncture between the Bharatiya Janata Party’s sweeping electoral success in recent national elections and its lacklustre performance in state elections. I suggest that this phenomenon is a result of centralisation in welfare delivery, which leads to greater attribution of welfare benefits for the Prime Minister. In turn, state chief ministers who have built their reputation on welfare delivery, many of whom are in the Bharatiya Janata Party or allied with it, have been adversely impacted. The consequences for current and future patterns of state politics are described.

The Warsaw conference, 2013, marked the halfway point from the Durban conference, 2011, that launched negotiations towards a 2015 climate agreement and the Paris conference, 2015, slated as the deadline for these negotiations. As such, the Warsaw conference needed to register a step change in the process—from the airing of differences to negotiating them. It also needed to create the conditions necessary to reach agreement in 2015. This article analyses the outcome of the Warsaw negotiations with a view to determining the extent to which it paves the way for a 2015 climate agreement. In particular, this article explores the divisions over, prospects for and contours of a likely 2015 agreement. The 2015 agreement is likely to be shaped by the resolution Parties arrive at on three overarching issues. These are: architecture—whether the agreement will be ‘top-down’ (prescriptive) or ‘bottom-up’ (facilitative) or a hybrid version of the two; differentiation—the nature and extent of it, and in particular whether it will eschew or replicate the Kyoto model of differentiation and related vision of equity; and legal form—whether the 2015 agreement will be legally binding, and if yes, as is likely, which elements of the 2015 package will be in the legally binding instrument and which elements will be in non-binding complementary decisions. The Warsaw outcome will therefore be analysed with a view to providing insights into the likely architecture and legal form of as well as treatment of differentiation and equity in the 2015 agreement

Uttar Pradesh is one of the most dangerous places in India to give birth: this state has a maternal mortality rate that was last seen in the UK in the 1940s. In an Article in this issue of The Lancet Global Health, Camilla Fabbri and colleagues point out that in the villages they work in, 15% of women received at least four antenatal care visits during their pregnancy, 11% were counselled on three danger signs during pregnancy, and 39% received clean cord care. A high-profile trial that used a checklist approach to address this inadequacy of care failed, finding no improvements in birth outcomes.

There is a rich city in our country that turns one of our major rivers into a sewage canal, but uses less than two-thirds of the sewerage treatment capacity it has installed.1 It sucks in water from distant hills, but still cannot provide water to even its planned settlements which, in any case, are home to less than one-fourth of its population.2 More is spent on connecting this city than on the national highway network that connects the five other major cities of the country – yet, the city cannot find depot space for its public bus service. While Mumbai spent its Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) money largely on water and sanitation, this city used it to build flyovers.

This city can demolish inhabited dwellings ‘illegally occupying’ land, but its car owners can prevent vehicles that occupy land in a similarly illegal manner – indeed, even more land than the dwellings in question – from being towed away.3 It can afford not to worry about economic activity, and relocate not just people, but also industries to the periphery. Not surprisingly, over 2001 to 2011, population growth fell dramatically from over 4% per year to below 2% annually, but growth in the neighbouring districts rose as noticeably.

It is this city that serves as an aspiration for many Indians and other cities. Flyovers proliferate and other large cities, especially state capitals, taking cue, have been laying claim to their own metro rail systems, each kilometre of which could fund a thousand buses. This city has cunningly exploited its position as the national capital to appropriate a disproportionate share of national resources. But, do we want all our cities to be like Delhi? Is this a smart thing to do?

The last two decades have seen an expansion of judicial power in developing and newly democratizing countries across the globe. The enhanced role for the judiciary, which some scholars have categorized as a “juristocracy,” has accompanied a dialogue or at least a tendency for judges to look beyond their national borders at other courts for assistance in resolving difficult national, legal, and political disputes. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has drawn on the rationale of India’s apex court to support public interest litigation, while India’s courts have referred to judgments from South Africa, the United States, Canada and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to argue for a right to life with dignity. Such engagement with foreign laws has provoked criticism from influential judges like Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court for eroding national sovereignty and even imposing foreign interpretations on culturally contextual national issues.