The National Education Policy lacks a coherent strategy to strengthen public education. It does not own the narrative of education as a public good, instead the policy pushes for private practices antithetical to public goals.
The new National Education Policy, coming after a gap of nearly 34 years, has been met, by and large, with a lot of hope and expectation. It purports to provide a transformative frame for the education system to make it more flexible and accessible to all. It promises to align education with the aspirations of the youth, bringing to them the skills needed for the 21st century, while simultaneously being rooted in Indian culture and ethos. It advocates making extensive use of technology to bring knowledge closer to the students. It also claims to strengthen the public education system and to bring private provision of education in line with the same standards as imposed on the public.
In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise. Although much of the existing literature on India–Pakistan relations characterizes it as locked in acrimony and conflict, which arose from the bitterness of partition, a closer scrutiny reveals a more nuanced picture. Attempts at cooperation and dialogue between the two governments—and the rationale for undertaking them—complicate our understanding of a relationship apparently limited to instinctive antagonism, and help in creating a more rounded picture of the India–Pakistan dynamic.
In April 1950, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan met in Delhi to sign the landmark inter-dominion agreement known as the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, according to which India and Pakistan would be accountable to one another for the treatment of minorities in their countries. This agreement was the outcome of a mutual necessity for both governments to regulate the unchecked movement of minority population across the border, which led them into an unlikely–though nonetheless structurally integral–position of compromise and dialogue. In order to grapple with the phenomenon of cross-border movement of minorities, the two governments had to enter into a series of bilateral dialogues about how this could be regulated, and synchronised for both sides.
The Copenhagen Accord was reached among 28 Parties to the FCCC, including all major emitters and economies, as well as those representing the most vulnerable andleast developed. As deliberations remained deadlocked well into the second week of COP-15 when heads of state and government began to arrive, the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, in a bid to salvage the floundering conference, organized a high-level negotiation, in parallel with the official negotiations, to agree on the elements of a political deal. Earlier attempts by the Danish presidency to obtain COP authorization, explicit or implicit, to convene a select ‘Friends of the Chair’ group to negotiate a deal, had been scuttled by some developing States that soughtpolitical and ideological representation rather than regional and coalition-based as is customary. The high-level negotiations, given the many twists and turns they reportedly took, did not link back to the official negotiations. The COP, therefore, had neither authorized the formation of a group to negotiate the Accord, nor was it kept abreast of the negotiations as they evolved.
Cities are key for achieving the 1.5 °C warming limit of the Paris Agreement. However, synthesizing policy insights from the urban literature is a challenge, due to its rapid growth, breadth of topics and relative lack of assessments so far. Here we introduce methods from computational linguistics to build a systematic overview of research on transport, buildings, waste management and urban form. We find that the epistemic core of the mitigation-focused urban literature is currently centered on urban form and emissions accounting, while extensive research into demand-side options remain overlooked, including congestion and parking polices, active travel, and waste management. In the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 °C, and for meeting the target itself, all such city-scale opportunities need to be examined.Suggested Citation: Lamb, W.F., Callaghan, M.W., Creutzig, F., Khosla, R. and Minx, J.C., 2018. The literature landscape on 1.5° C climate change and cities. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 30, pp.26-34.
India’s centrality to global mitigation efforts makes it an important point of inquiry in studies of climate governance. However, we understand little of how climate change has been institutionalized in India’s decision-making processes. We capture the emergence and decline of climate institutions over three decades, showing how political conditions have shaped institutional form. The politics of opportunism has animated institutional development. It resolves the tension between India’s global leadership ambitions and a deeply entrenched, equity-focused narrative frame that rejects incurring large mitigation costs. Climate institutions have therefore been layered upon existing bodies and processes to create room for the organic, bottom-up growth of policies that meet development objectives while promoting mitigation. While this structure limits polarization around climate action, it also inhibits strategic intent, particularly because strong cross-governmental institutions have been unable to take root.
This article assesses the legal character and operational relevance of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature goal. This article begins with a textual analysis of the 1.5°C goal. It considers whether the goal creates individual or collective obligations for Parties, and whether it is sufficiently specific to enable the tracking of individual or collective performance. Next, it assesses the operational relevance of the 1.5°C temperature goal, by considering the role it will play in the Paris Agreement’s institutions and procedures. To the extent that the goal plays a role, and implies global limits on greenhouse gas emissions, this article observes that it could have implications for the sharing of the effort between Parties. Thus, this article considers the relevance of equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances, to understanding how the 1.5°C goal could be reached. In this context, this article explores whether the 1.5°C goal could play a role in the Paris Agreement’s ‘ambition cycle’. Finally, this article asks whether there are any legal or political implications, individually or collectively under the Paris Agreement, should the Parties fail to achieve the 1.5°C goal
This article is part of the theme issue ‘The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’.
Suggested Citation: Rajamani L, Werksman J. 2018 The legal character and operational relevance of the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 376: 20160458.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0458
This article analyses three overarching issues that have bedevilled the climate negotiations right from the start and options for addressing them in the ongoing Paris Agreement Work Programme negotiations. These issues are: (1) How legally binding should the United Nations (UN) climate change regime be? (2) How prescriptive should the UN climate change regime be, and how much should it leave to national discretion? (3) To what extent should the rules of the UN climate change regime be common or differentiated and, if the latter, on what basis and how?
Suggested citation:
Bodansky, Daniel and Lavanya Rajamani. 2018. “The Issues that Never Die.” In: Special Issue on the Paris Rulebook. Carbon and Climate Law Review 12(3): 184 -190.
It is axiomatic that the climate impacts documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are likely to undermine the realisation of a range of protected human rights. Yet it is only in the recent past that an explicit human rights approach has been brought to bear on the climate change problem. Scholars and human rights bodies have begun to advocate a human rights-centred approach to climate change—an approach which would place the individual at the centre of inquiry, and draw attention to the impact that climate change could have on human rights protection. This article focuses on the human rights claims raised in the climate negotiations, the implications these claims may have and the interests they may serve. The article argues that human rights approaches, taken in their entirety, have the potential to bring much needed attention to individual welfare as well as to provide ethical moorings in inter-governmental climate negotiations currently characterised by self-interested deal-seeking. Human rights approaches provide benchmarks against which states’ actions can be evaluated and they offer the possibility of holding authorities to account. Human rights approaches may also offer additional criteria for the interpretation of applicable principles and obligations that states have to each other, to their own citizens, and to the citizens of other states in relation to climate change. This article seeks to provide initial insights into the ways in which human-rights-based interpretations of applicable principles and obligations may serve to influence some of the current debates in the climate negotiations.
