Archives: Journal Articles

The EU is engaged in an ambitious, controversial, and high-stakes experiment to extend the reach of its climate change law. It is seeking to use its market power to stimulate climate action, and to substitute for climate inaction, elsewhere. This is most apparent in relation to the EU’s decision to include aviation in its emissions trading scheme. While we are sympathetic to the EU’s objectives, and do not take issue with its unilateral means, we argue that the EU is not giving adequate weight to the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDRRC). While the status, meaning, and implications of this principle are contested and unclear, it requires that developed countries should take the lead in addressing the causes and effects of climate change. We argue that the concept of CBDRRC retains relevance in the context of unilateral climate action, and that the EU’s Aviation Directive should be interpreted, applied, and where necessary adjusted in the light of it. We put forward two concrete proposals to achieve this end.

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research.

INDIAN environmentalism has been an important, even defining, element of a distinctly Southern brand of environmentalism.1 Largely rooted in local struggles over access to and control over resources, a stylized Southern environmentalism is closely connected to concerns over social justice and driven by subalterns rather than professionals.2 From this perspective, the recent emergence of climate change as a meta-narrative for global environmentalism is profoundly unsettling. Introduced as a problem by scientists, carried forward by professional environmentalists from the North, and debated in the language of techno-managerialism and legalism, climate change would appear to be the embodiment of an ‘ecology of affluence’.3

In this article, I examine the tensions and challenges of Indian – and indeed Southern – environmentalism in an age of climate change. Like no other single issue, climate change has brought environmentalism into the political mainstream. Commerce and finance ministers increasingly register their presence at global environmental negotiations. Climate change is high up the agenda of mainstream global talk shops from the G-8 to Davos. In India, climate change has become a bone of foreign policy contention, and opinion columns are filled with climate commentaries, including by those who have demonstrated little interest in the subject before.

However, to many Indian environmentalists, this is a largely unrecognizable form of environmentalism – the environmentalism of the boardroom and the negotiating table. Does engaging with the climate change debate necessarily require embracing a different vision of environmentalism? Or is there a way to engage with climate change even while harnessing the energy and ideas of an environmentalism of the South? I suggest that there is indeed a way for Southern environmentalists to productively engage the climate change debate and, indeed, that it is necessary to do so. After laying out the tensions between climate change and Southern environmentalism, I spell out one way to conceptualize climate change that is consistent with the lived experience of local level environmental governance challenges.

To begin with, it is worth recalling the characteristics of climate change that have propelled the issue up the political agenda – the scale, scope, and potential implications of the problem.4 Climate change operates on a global scale. Greenhouse gases emitted in one place have a global aggregate effect due to the ‘greenhouse effect’ by which the sun’s energy is trapped within the atmosphere, and no specific effect on the place from which are emitted. As a result, reducing emissions in one place brings little gain unless emissions are reduced from enough places to make an appreciable difference to total emissions; climate change is truly a global collective action problem.

In a bid to fast-track environmental clearances for industrial projects, the Narendra Modi government constituted a high-level committee in 2014 under T S R Subramanian to review key environmental laws. In the context of the controversial recommendations made by the T S R Subramanian Committee to ease environmental norms and dilute people’s participation in environmental governance to stimulate economic development, the article takes a critical look at the functioning of the Environmental Impact Assessment regime in India since its inception in 1994.

There are some worrying signals from the new government in New Delhi that it could compromise on environmental concerns in the pursuit of more rapid growth: clearances could be given quickly (i e, environment protection requirements will be loosened), the Land Acquisition Act could be diluted and more. It may be more useful if we shake ourselves free of the obsession with GDP growth rates and try instead to make India a caring, humane, compassionate, equitable, just and harmonious society.

THE end of 2009 is a good time to ask where Indian foreign policy is headed. More specifically, it is an appropriate time to enquire where it is moving in redefining its ties with the pre-eminent global super power, the United States of America.

The PM’s visit to Washington DC at the year’s end found America’s political and military leadership in a sombre mood. Despite announcing a surge of forces in Afghanistan, the Western powers are in the early stages of setting a timetable for drawing down their presence. Conditions in Iraq, though more stable, are also fragile. Colossus it may be, but both wars have exposed America’s limitations.

But it is the larger picture of Indo-American relations that matter more. In 2008, the alliance of parties that kept Manmohan Singh’s first coalition government in office broke up as the Left parties opposed the Indo-US nuclear accord. For the first time, a foreign policy issue became an acid test of a government’s survival on the floor of Parliament. The United Progressive Alliance survived and it won another term in May 2009.

India’s relationship with the United States has clearly undergone a major shift. In 1968, India was a major target of the regime under the then new Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty or NPT. Ever since the Pokhran explosions of 1974 and 1998, the US led the way in a regime of sanctions against this country. The Indo-US agreement drove a gaping hole through that treaty even though India has not been given the rank of a nuclear weapon power.

Critics still see the nuclear accord and the larger relationship as foreclosure of Indian autonomy. Such criticisms surfaced again albeit in different form on the eve of the Copenhagen summit in December 2009. Running through such debates is a common thread. How far India ought to go to secure accord hinges on how its vital interests are defined.

Here lies the nub of the issue. India and the USA will indeed have closer ties in the new century. But what will the role model for India be? The old Cold War divisions are gone, though its lingering, even damaging, impact remains. China is a rising power but it is yet to challenge American dominance across the globe. Russia is rebuilding itself under Putin and now Medvedev, but is a shadow of the former Soviet Union. Unified Europe is still to assert itself.

US engagement with Asia has a long history. Two decades ago, the Cold War drew to a close in Afghanistan as Soviet troops exited after a decade. Within two years, the US was engaged for the first time since Vietnam in a land war in Asia – in Kuwait. 9/11 led to American direct engagement in Afghanistan. It transformed Pakistan again into a frontline state, this time in the so-called ‘war on terror’.

The social audit of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme conducted in Dungarpur district of Rajasthan brought out the administrative preparedness for the scheme and the benefits for women workers. Some problems remain, most importantly the lack of childcare facilities.

Justifications and criticisms of empire have often focused on the effects of empire on imperial “subjects.” But an older criticism of empire equally focuses upon the way the possession of empire transforms the identity of the imperial state itself by altering its constitution, implicating its people in projects that happen elsewhere, and forcing them to define their relationship to applications of power in a radically new way. On this view the real danger of empire often is the effect it has on the state possessing the empire. In our times in particular, empire is thought to have a profound impact on the functioning of democracy in the imperial state itself. This article seeks to recover the moral sensibility that lies behind this form of moral criticism. It also seeks to examine, briefly, whether America is vulnerable to the “corruptions” of empire and the weight we should place on this moral consideration.