Archives: Journal Articles

The reluctance of the state to acknowledge domestic workers as workers and its passive stance on the demand for a specific legislation foregrounds a dominant social bias.

Governments struggle with the reality that the beneficiaries of anti-poverty programs are powerless to influence policies and prevent the possibility of capture of benefits by the non-poor. Networks – social and political – are supposed to increase the ability of the less-powerful to access their entitlements. This article assesses whether socially and politically networked households do in fact have better awareness of the components of the program and of the processes of decision making, and whether such networking makes them more likely to vocalise their dissatisfaction when their entitlements are threatened. India’s national rural employment guarantee scheme’s institutional design (mandating village assemblies to authorise decisions on the projects) makes it a good test case. Our results show that links to social and political networks significantly increase the beneficiary’s awareness of the program’s components and enhances the ability to seek redress.

What does India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution imply for its approach to climate negotiations? And what implications does it have for domestic development choices? This article examines India’s INDC through each lens, to understand the implied logic with regard to India’s complex climate-development choices, and with regard to its strategic international choices. It finds that the INDC reflects, as yet, an inadequate consideration of the climate and development linkages that should inform India’s actions. The contribution reflects a strategic choice to be “middle of the road,” which neither disrupts the fragile diplomatic consensus nor creates pressure for more urgent global action.

Suggested citation: Dubash, N.K and Khosla, R (2015) : “Neither Brake Nor Accelerator : Assessing India’s Climate Contribution”, Economic and Political Weekly,Vol L, No 42, pp 10-14

The population of Gurgaon, a city of an estimated 2.5 million people located south of India’s capital Delhi and within the National Capital Region, grew by 73.9 percent in 2001-2011. While Gurgaon’s private sector housing market attracted educated migrants, residents of urban villages built rental housing for low-income migrant workers. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Nathupur village in 2013 and Sikanderpur village in 2017, this paper focuses on the experience of low-income migrant renters in the informal rental markets that are controlled and managed by village landlords. It focuses on living conditions, sense of security and the nature of tenant-landlord relationships. Despite the dominance of landlords, I posit that migrants mediate their housing choices as per their migration strategy and leverage oral contracts to move flexibly through rental housing in different locations at different times. Further, by characterising landlords as benevolent, renters keep their opportunities for employment and reward open while potentially exerting reputational pressures on landlords through criticism of their exploitative practices. Lastly, migrant renters challenge social norms set by landlords by everyday acts of resistance. These strategies of mediation, negotiation and subjectivities enable rural migrants to establish a relationship, however tenuous, with the city and maximise their returns from it.

The on-going UN negotiations for a 2015 climate agreement have yet to resolve two fundamental legal issues on which the effectiveness of this agreement will hinge. First, they have yet to resolve the precise legal form this agreement will take. Parties agreed in Durban, 2011 to launch work towards a ‘protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties’ to be adopted in Paris in December, 2015. This formulation, reflective of divergences among Parties, leaves scope for a range of possibilities on legal form, some of which are binding and others are not. Second, Parties have yet to determine, the legal nature of the ‘nationally determined contributions’ Parties are expected to submit in the context of the 2015 agreement. This article seeks to address these two critical legal issues in the 2015 climate negotiations. In addressing the issue of ‘legal form’, it identifies the instruments that will likely form part of the Paris package and explores the characteristic features of each with a particular focus on their legal status, significance and influence. In addressing the issue of the ‘legal nature’ of nationally determined contributions submitted by Parties, the paper considers the nature and scope of contributions, the range of options for ‘housing’ them, as well as their relationship to the core 2015 agreement. It will also consider the extent to which the legal nature of contributions may be differentiated across types of contributions (such as on mitigation, adaptation, finance or technology) and/or groups of Parties (such as developed and developing).

This paper presents results on the participation of rural workers in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme based on a pilot survey of three villages in the Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. These villages are Kaligiri, Obulayyapale and Reddivaripalle, and they were surveyed in December 2007. In contrast to an earlier study of ours on Rajasthan, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) participated in higher numbers in AP, but in both states these groups participated for slightly lower spells than the residual group of ‘Others’. We find that AP performed better than Rajasthan in terms of targeting poorer caste and income groups such as SCs, STs and landless households. The number of days worked on average was much higher than suggested by other assessments. Our econometric analysis further reinforces the view that disadvantaged groups are not only more likely to participate but also for longer spells. Thus the performance of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme has been far from dismal.

Global climate change governance has changed substantially in the last decade, with a shift in focus from negotiating globally agreed greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets to nationally determined contributions, as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. This paper analyses trends in adoption of national climate legislation and strategies, GHG targets, and renewable and energy efficiency targets in almost all UNFCCC Parties, focusing on the period from 2007 to 2017. The uniqueness and added value of this paper reside in its broad sweep of countries, the more than decade-long coverage and the use of objective metrics rather than normative judgements. Key results show that national climate legislation and strategies witnessed a strong increase in the first half of the assessed decade, likely due to the political lead up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, but have somewhat stagnated in recent years, currently covering 70% of global GHG emissions (almost 50% of countries). In comparison, the coverage of GHG targets increased considerably in the run up to adoption of the Paris Agreement and 89% of global GHG emissions are currently covered by such targets. Renewable energy targets saw a steady spread, with 79% of the global GHG emissions covered in 2017 compared to 45% in 2007, with a steep increase in developing countries.

This Preview article discusses a new paper by Wei Peng and colleagues that develops a decision tool accounting for political feasibility while prioritizing air-pollution policies with high mitigation potential in India. The article argues that such multi-criteria tools, when extended to consider economic costs and equity, could be key to policy making in a crisis, amid scientific uncertainties. Harish outlines a multi-criteria framework for air quality management in India and discusses opportunities to apply this in India’s National Clean Air Programme.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policy-making has largely been conducted in isolation of development considerations. An emerging literature, bolstered by the “nationally determined” nature of the Paris Agreement, explores the identification and assessment of the co-impacts of mitigation actions. There is now a recognized need to consider mitigation an integral part of a multi-objective development challenge. However, the literature on how to practically and effectively apply this in policy-making, particularly in developing economies, is limited. This paper explores the potential for using approaches that fall under the umbrella of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in guiding analyses and policy-making that relate to the climate mitigation–development interface. It categorizes three distinct types of decision problems in the broad area of climate and development policy-making, and presents lessons from three case studies, in India, Chile, and Peru and Colombia taken together, where aspects of MCDA approaches were explored. Based on these reviews, the paper concludes that MCDA approaches, despite certain limitations, can add substantive and procedural credibility to existing toolkits supporting climate and development decision-making. Key contributions of the approach are to structure the analyses, systematically include stakeholder deliberations, and provide tools to rigorously incorporate quantitative and qualitative co-impacts in multiple objective-based decisions.

Suggested Citation: Brett Cohen, Hernán Blanco, Navroz K. Dubash, Srihari Dukkipati, Radhika Khosla, Serban Scrieciu, Theodor Stewart & Marta Torres-Gunfaus (2018) Multi-criteria decision analysis in policy-making for climate mitigation and development, Climate and Development, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2018.1445612

R Seenivasan’s article (“Historical Validity of Mullaperiyar Project”, EPW, 25 January 2014) on the Mullaperiyar Project, hereafter MP, is a scholarly, well-researched, informative piece of historical writing. Regrettably, he seems to have failed to understand the thrust of my criticisms of the project. When a critic says that the project was an unnecessary and indefensible onslaught on nature, it is no answer to argue that it represented the best engineering. Given a purely engineering perspective, the project might well have seemed very good in the 1890s. However, that perspective ceased long ago to be unquestioningly accepted.

Seenivasan questions my remarks about hubristic engineering, and about rivers being treated as no more than pipelines to be turned, cut and welded. What are the undisputed facts in this case? The waters of a west-flowing river were substantially turned eastwards, made to flow through a 5,700 ft-long tunnel, and led into the Vaigai. Was my description, cited disapprovingly by Seenivasan, inappropriate for such a project?