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Grand strategy, the historian John Lewis Gaddis said, is the aligning of “potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities” across “space, time, and scale.” Having witnessed the United States (US) overreach during the Cold War, Gaddis knew the costs of failing to match ends with means all too well. In a somewhat different context, India is facing a chasm between its global aspirations and the reality of its national power. A confluence of disruptive factors has now made the business-as-usual approach simply unsustainable. A course correction if not undertaken and executed sensibly could imperil India’s rise for the next generation.

Two recent events exemplify India’s geopolitical dilemma. In early April 2013, it was reported that Chinese submarines had been conducting forays in the Indian Ocean that were apparently picked up by US Navy sonar.1 A few weeks later, there was a Chinese intrusion in the western sector where a platoon of Chinese troops entered the Depsang Valley area of eastern Ladakh.2 While the status quo ante was peacefully attained, the Ladakh incident is a vivid reminder of the abiding implications of an unresolved Himalayan dispute. Collectively, what both these events also evoke is a deeper contestation in India’s geostrategy vis-à-vis China. India’s geostrategy is being contested by Mackinder and Mahanian images, and some of India’s strategic ambivalence can be traced to the lack of a welldefined geopolitical image to ground this debate.

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India’s energy and emissions future is challenged by the uncertainties of India’s development transitions, including its pathway through a demographic and urban transition within a rapidly changing policy context. Model-based scenario analyses provide widely varying projections, in part because they make differing assumptions, often implicit, about these transitions. To address the uncertainty in India’s energy and emissions future, this letter applies a novel interpretive approach to existing scenario studies. First, we make explicit the implied development, technology and policy assumptions underlying model-based analysis in order to cluster and interpret results. In a second step, we analyse India’s current policy landscape and use that as a benchmark against which to judge scenario assumptions and results. Using this interpretive approach, we conclude that, based on current policies, a doubling of India’s CO2 energy-related emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for its 2030 emissions and that this trajectory is consistent with meeting India’s Paris emissions intensity pledge. Because of its low emissions starting point, even after a doubling, India’s 2030 per capita emissions will be below today’s global average and absolute emissions will be less than half of China’s 2015 emissions from the same sources. The analysis of recent policy trends further suggests a lower than expected electricity demand and a faster than expected transition from coal to renewable electricity. The letter concludes by making an argument for interpretive approaches as a necessary complement to scenario analysis, particularly in rapidly changing development contexts.

As the neo-liberal world order declines, non-Western powers are uniquely equipped to manage the power transition and contestations over the basic tenets of the emerging system. India’s civilisational ethos of reconciling different ideas will be of immense value in navigating the uncertainty and turmoil at a critical juncture of world history.

In a recent speech, India’s national security advisor (NSA), Shivshankar Menon, noted: ‘Since 2008, the post-Cold War world that we had got used to is metamorphosing into something very different, as different from the previous two decades as those two decades were from the four decades of the Cold War.’ Menon further observed that, the ‘unipolar moment… came to an end with the global economic crisis of 2008. And now a fundamental reordering of the international economy appears to be underway.’1

Indian perceptions of a changing international environment suggest Indian foreign policy as a whole, and in its parts, is poised for change. This article confines itself to one dyad (India-China) in the search for a policy-relevant understanding of bilateral relations.

Unfortunately, India-China relations have not been conceptualized holistically, and from the Indian viewpoint. This article contends that in order to comprehensively analyze India’s relationship with China, the bilateral equation must be located and analyzed in three geopolitical realms: the sub-regional or South Asian realm, the Asia-Pacific realm, and the global realm. Further, this article uses the concept of roles to identify and illuminate the conflict-cooperation mix in each of the above-mentioned geopolitical realms based on whether India and China’s conceptions of their evolving roles in each of these realms are in conflict or compatible or even complement each other.

Mainstream international relations analyses has not adequately addressed the notion that the character of inter-state relations is shaped as much by geography as it is by ideas and roles that condition a state’s foreign policy. For example, bilateral relations in the geopolitical conditions of East Asia imply a very different dynamic to a bilateral dyad in the classical European continental arena. The reasons for the difference lie in the nature of geography where contending states pursue their interests. The geography of the Asia-Pacific, some opine, lends itself to a stable geopolitical environment where states can pursue security goals without provoking a costly zero-sum dynamic.2 In contrast, the intensely competitive European arena of the pre-1945 era witnessed recurring security competitions that escalated to costly hegemonic projects by one or the other great powers of Europe.

Yet, geography by itself does not predispose states toward any particular modes of behaviour. All it does is make certain geostrategies more viable or costly than others. Recent scrambling for power and influence in the Western Pacific underscores that state agency and strategic choices matter.

How can India undertake its large projected growth in buildings while simultaneously meeting its development, energy and climate objectives? The Building and Research Information special issue sets out to help answer this question by developing and extending the growing body of research on the topic, with the aim to help define the built environment in India as an emerging and important field of socio-technical enquiry. The special issue’s framing of the problem departs from the often used techno-economic view and instead suggests that both technical infrastructures, such as the built environment, and social infrastructures, such as policies, professions, habits and norms, shape behaviour, and as a consequence offer significant potential for reducing overall energy demand and GHG emissions. This editorial, which contextualizes the special issue, sets a three-pronged multidisciplinary framework for current and future research on India’s building stock, and associates the papers in the special issue with this agenda. It also points to the importance of international research collaborations in seeking solutions to India’s energy and climate change challenges.

Suggested Citation: Khosla, Radhika and Kathryn B. Janda. 2018. “India’s building stock: towards energy and climate change solutions.” Building Research & Information 47(1):1-7.

In the last decade of the multilateral climate negotiations, particularly in the negotiations leading up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, India questioned the need to negotiate a new legally binding instrument. Although other developing countries were also initially reluctant to negotiate a new legally binding instrument, over time their opposition fell away, and in the end, India alone remained opposed to the negotiation of a new legally binding instrument to fortify the climate change regime. Instead, India endorsed and privileged other softer forms of law, thus both triggering innovation and experimentation in law-making as well as blurring the boundaries between law, soft law, and non-law. This article examines India’s position in the last decade of the climate negotiations in relation to ‘‘legal bindingness’’, exploring in particular possible reasons for India’s wariness on issues relating to ‘‘legal bindingness’’.

Delhi’s decision to abstain on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1973, authorising the use of force in the Libyan civil war was not about expressing India’s non- aligned or non-Western identity. Delhi’s own mixed record on international interventions suggests there was no question of high principle involved in its UNSC vote on Libya. Delhi’s response can be explained in terms of India’s strategic culture that is very risk-averse and rather prudent when it comes to the use of force. It has also been shaped in part by a long- standing domestic political tradition of expressing wariness towards Western intervention in the Middle East. India’s policy on Libya appears to be driven by a cold calculus of national interest and a healthy scepticism about the use of force by third parties towards an internal conflict.

Increasing evidence suggests that the level and distribution of cognitive skills is more important to economic development than absolute measures of schooling attainment, and that income and skill inequality are inextricably linked. Yet for most of the developing world no internationally comparable estimates of cognitive skills exist. This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states—Orissa and Rajasthan—on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5% of children rank higher than the bottom 5% in only three countries—South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score distribution for both states is next only to South Africa. The combination of India’s size and large variance in achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. How India’s development unfolds will depend critically on how the skill distribution evolves and how low- and high-skilled workers interact in the labor market.