Archives: Journal Articles

The goal of this special issue is to highlight cultural, social, and political contexts and how they have affected the balance struck between rights protection and religious accommodation, and more specifically the interplay between the constitutionalization of religion on the one hand and societal tensions over issues of religious identity or religious practice on the other. The five articles focus on the social and political contestations surrounding the creation of laws that attempt to balance different sets of rights, during the constitution-writing stage and its subsequent interpretation by lawyers, politicians, judges and social movements. The articles show how the balance between religious accommodation and human rights protection is sometimes achieved by or through the law, and sometimes despite it. Under certain conditions, constitutional and broader legal means facilitate the mitigation of conflicts over religious issues, while under others recourse to the law may deepen and sharpen the very conflict over religion that the legal action (particularly the turn to courts) purports to resolve. And in some cases, rather than producing social, political or religious change, constitutions merely reflect compromises that have been achieved prior to the constitutionalization of religion, while the de-facto changes in particular regulations or practices related to religion may be determined outside the arena of constitutional law, for example by ordinary legislation or bureaucratic regulations. In particular, the contributions accentuate the influence of domestic actors—key elites, courts, political parties, and civil society groups—in shaping the boundaries between the domains of religion and the state in constitutions, laws, and their interpretations, and the consequences of this boundary-drawing for religious polarization and rapprochement.

After months of incremental progress on negotiating text for the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December, recent talks in Bangkok unearthed a deal breaker – the fate of the Kyoto Protocol. Most developed countries are advocating a single integrated instrument at Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol. This article explores the anatomy of the G-77/China’s resistance to such a new instrument, and argues that this instrument is likely, given emerging political realities, to take a fundamentally different character, and burdensharing arrangement, from that of the Kyoto Protocol.

Buildings have significant ecological footprint. But they could also be sources of energy savings. This potential of buildings, however, remains untapped. Andhra Pradesh is among the first Indian states to adopt a mandatory building energy policy. This paper analyses the reasons for the state’s success. It argues that Andhra Pradesh’s success owes to the state identifying the constraints of the sector’s underlying institutional and technical arrangements, as opposed to following a top-down policymaking approach. These constraints were addressed during regulatory design through a participatory process involving state and non-state actors. As a result, local solutions have bridged the gap between existing structures and policy goals. In drawing from Andhra Pradesh’s example, this paper offers lessons for ways to overcome the gridlock in building energy efficiency and the need to embed policy goals in their broader implementation context.

Suggested citation: Khosla, R, (2016) : “Closing the Policy Gap: Building Energy Code Lessons from Andhra Pradesh”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol L1, No 2, pp 66-73

What is the appropriate balance between scientific analysis and governmental input in the IPCC? Claiming government overreach and calling for greater insulation of the process come from a misleadingly simple interpretation. Such insulation would likely diminish the policy relevance of the SPM. The SPM is “approved” by governments, not merely “accepted” as is the main report, which invests it with an important measure of governmental ownership. An approval process is worth preserving, as it is precisely what makes the IPCC distinct from any number of technical reports. We explore an alternative vision for articulating science and politics at the IPCC.

In Science, 4 July 2014 | The full online text is available here. | A PDF reprint of the original article in Science is available here.

Over the last two decades, many countries have passed laws addressing climate change and related areas. Research now shows that these laws make a difference to emission outcomes, but the pathways of impact require further research.

Climate change poses particularly difficult challenges for India. On the one hand, India does not want any constraints on its development prospects. On the other, it also wants to be seen as an emerging global power that requires a leadership role on key global issues like climate change. It can either approach climate change as a “stand alone” global negotiation, or, weave these negotiations into a “grand bargain” involving linkages with other international negotiations. In order to understand these issues better, a conference on climate change held in New Delhi in March 2009 focused on the different bargains India might have to strike, both domestically and internationally, to respond to these challenges. The papers presented here highlight some of the key issues raised in the conference and also the analysis and interpretation of the main points of discussion.

Abstract: This article considers how far the climate change regime is an exemplar of international environmental law as well as public international law. We focus on five issues: the nature and extent of differentiation in favour of developing countries, the role of soft law, the dynamics of decision-making in multilateral negotiations, the contribution of dispute settlement, and the impact of (and assumptions underlying) scholarly offerings in this field. This article argues that the climate regime has both benefited from normative developments elsewhere as well as contributed to such developments (for instance, as regards the use and absorption of soft law within the regime). The article concludes with a reflection on legal scholarship and climate change and seeks to externalise the challenges, demands, choices and values of those who contribute to the discussion, to recognise the benefit of diversity.

The pattern of civil–military interaction in India is informed by the notion that civilians should refrain from involvement in operational matters. The emergence of this trend can be traced back to the defeat against China in 1962. In its aftermath, the belief that the debacle occurred because of civilian interference took hold. Thereafter, politicians restricted themselves to giving overall directives, leaving operational matters to the military. The Indian ‘victory’ in the subsequent war with Pakistan was seen as vindicating this arrangement. This essay argues that the conventional reading of the China crisis is at best misleading and at worst erroneous. Further, it contends that the subsequent war with Pakistan actually underscores the problems of civilian non-involvement in operational issues. The historical narrative underpinning the norm of civilian abstention is at the very least dubious.

As the subject of this article is outside my usual beat of water-related issues, let me begin on a personal note. In the late 1940s and early 1950s – before I accidentally stumbled into central civil service – I studied and later taught English language and literature at Elphinstone College, Mumbai. Among other things, I developed a deep interest in linguistics, phonology, philosophy of grammar, and so on. In 1949, I was introduced to Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein’s work by my friend (the late) K J Shah, a student and friend of Wittgenstein’s, who had just returned from Cambridge, and that philosophy became a lifelong interest. That was the route through which I came to Noam Chomsky