Natalia Ciecierska-Holmes, Kirsten Jörgensen, Lana Laura Ollier and D. Raghunandan
In light of India’s rapidly growing economy, environmental policy has become a pressing issue for the country. India’s economic liberalisation started in 1991 and has at times triggered double-digit growth rates. Rapid economic growth, industrialisation, growing energy needs, urbanisation and changing consumption patterns are putting increasing pressure on India’s natural resources, livelihoods in forest and rural areas, and the quality of air and water. They are also posing health risks.
There are a variety of academic contributions that provide insights into Indian environmental regulation and policy (Chopra 2017a; Jasanoff 1993; Rajamani 2007; Ramesh 2015; Reich and Bowonder 1992). Yet, further insights are needed from a public policy perspective, which helps us to gain a deeper understanding of policy stasis and change, stable and shifting policy paradigms and how that matters, the role played by governments, public administration, legislators, civil society actors, the corporate sector and research in environmental policy. This book offers a fresh perspective by considering environmental policymaking in India in terms of its historic, domestic and international contexts.
The chapters shed light both on the factors that shape India’s environmental policy and performance today, and on the dynamics and mechanisms that have been driving policy change over the past four to five decades. In particular, the authors examine the interplay between governmental and non-governmental actors and institutions that are shaping and have shaped environmental governance in India. Their analyses highlight the social, economic and ecological challenges arising from the apparent contradictions between economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Many of the problems India faces as an emerging economy are similar to those faced in industrial countries. However, India’s rapid economic growth, and to some extent an environmental race-to-the-bottom, together with population growth, poverty, inadequate infrastructures and social services put pressure on India’s natural environment. India ranked 130 among 189 countries in the Human Development Index 2018 (United Nations Development Programme 2018). Nevertheless, economic development also provides the country with opportunities towards a more environmentally sustainable future particularly lying in technological innovation and environmental leapfrogging. Moreover, as we show in the remainder of this book, opportunities for socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable development trajectories also lie in India’s vibrant civil society and international cooperation.
The following section sets a frame for this book by showing how environmental policy first emerged as a policy field in India and explores the main characteristics that shape India’s environmental policy landscape. Then, the theoretical undercurrents that shape the book’s chapters are introduced before presenting an outline of the book’s structure.
1.1 The emergence of environmental policy in India
Looking back to the time before the emergence of India’s environmental policy, environmental regulation was sparse and fragmented during the first post-colonial phase between 1947 and 1968. Environmental policy first appeared on India’s political agenda after the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. This conference gave the initial impulse for the incumbent Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to first develop the field of environmental policy in India. Shortly after the conference, a few environmental regulations and government institutions were established, with India becoming one of the first countries in the world to institutionalise its environmental policy by creating a designated ministry for the environment in 1980. However, it remained largely a symbolic effort and it was not until the devastating industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 that the involvement of governmental, civil society and private sector actors in the field increased. This is akin to a number of industrialised countries, in which environmental problems were first addressed in an issue-specific manner as a direct result of environmental catastrophes. The chemical accident in Bhopal in 1984 or the large-scale forest depletion in Germany in the 1980s provides noticeable examples. While industrialised countries continue to move from an end-of-pipe approach towards a pre-emptive policy approach, which regulates pollution at the source, this process has been much slower in India. Following the country’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s, environmental issues slowly started to move on to the political agenda.
However, environmental policy and performance in India at the start of the 1990s faced the issues of “bureaucratic inflexibility, unreasonable standards, lax monitoring and enforcement, lengthy court cases” (Jasanoff 1993, 37). In 2018, India had plummeted in the Environmental Performance Index which ranked India among the bottom five countries. Among 180 countries, India had dropped 36 points from rank 141 in 2016 to 177 in 2018 (Wendling et al. 2018).
1.2 Features of Indian environmental politics
Indian environmental politics is characterised by a range of features, which will resurface throughout this book. Such features include institutions, such as India’s centralised federal system, colonial legacies and path dependencies, the impacts of economic liberalisation, neo-liberal growth strategies, and the carbon lock-in of India’s energy economy. Other features are related to actors and ideas, such as the outstanding importance of the civil society; the different development frames of environmental and climate policy, which include social equity and justice; and the persistent growth first paradigm. Further features are presented by the relevance of forests as livelihoods and India’s cautious approaches to environmental leapfrogging. India’s rising importance as an international player in climate policy and bilateral relations is significant in various environmental governance contexts.
As in many federal systems, such as Germany and the USA, the central government took the lead during the initial phases (starting in the 1970s) of the development of environmental policy. Initially, environmental protection was only hesitantly placed on India’s governmental agenda in India’s Fourth Five-Year Plan (FYP) (1969–1974), which addressed the challenges and the need for action (Chopra 2017b). Environmental degradation and pollution, soil erosion, water scarcity, and water and air pollution put increased pressure on the government “to accommodate new environmental demands while simultaneously guaranteeing economic growth” (Agrawal and Yokozuka 2002, 240).
But India’s unique actor landscape also provides vast opportunities for bottom-up environmental action, testing, experimentation and scale-up in the multi-tiered political system, which includes India’s subnational states, the Union territories, cities and rural panchayats (Jörgensen et al. 2015). However, this potential for environmental multilevel governance has not been significantly utilised. India’s environmental policymaking and the interplay between national, state and local administrative levels quite often lacked efficacy (Agrawal and Yokozuka 2002). So far, there is also no indication that India’s state governments are going to fill the gap by taking environmental protection more seriously by pioneering environmentally sustainable development. That said, it was India’s court system, civil society and government entrepreneurs that oftentimes contributed to bringing environmental problems onto the agenda.
Across diverse environmental policy areas, such as forests, water, industry and international climate policy, there are noticeable legacies of colonial rule in India’s environmental institutions and politics. This concerns India’s role at an international level as well as the citizen-state relationship in India. When environmental policy in India emerged in a top-down manner, it was perceived by non-governmental actors as a “neo-colonial” mode of governance that denied citizens simple participatory rights (Jasanoff 1993, 38).
It is not just industrialised economies that have become locked-into fossil fuel-based energy systems. Rapidly industrialising countries, such as India, are also beset by technical and institutional path dependencies, such as the carbon lock-in, which inhibit environmental and climate protection. A coal-based energy mix combined with a low financial capacity, plus the presence of strong capital and emission-intensive industries, as found in India and China, for example, impedes the transition of the energy sector to a low-carbon economy (Never and Betz 2014). Coal continues to play an important role in India, and current projections also show an increased usage of coal energy.
Another feature that reoccurs throughout this book is the impact of the global neoliberal turn and the effects of the neoliberal economic policy paradigm in India on employment, poverty eradication, social equality and rural development. In the 1990s, neoliberal policies partially diffused in India and were further promoted under the Hindu Nationalist Party influence after 1998. Neoliberal economic rules, such as freedom of markets, deregulation and privatisation, tend to conflict with environmental policy and put pressure on natural resources through exploitation (Harvey 2005). In India, as in other developing countries, the primacies of deregulation and privatisation made it harder to develop sustainable forest and water governance practices and to maintain livelihoods in the forest and mountain areas. Liberalisation in India was often implemented regardless of negative effects on the environment, labour and infrastructures (Bhaduri and Nayyar 1996).
Civil society has always played an important role in governing India’s development. However, in the 21st century, more groups, interests and organisations are actively influencing India’s policy processes (Sil 2014). Environmental activism has become more important and is concerned with a variety of issues. In rural areas, significant activity occurs around environmental disasters; governance for sustainable development, e.g., afforestation programs; and mobilisation against industrial projects threatening the environment and livelihoods. In urban areas, supportive networks disseminating information and carrying out research became more important (Agrawal and Yokozuka 2002, 251). The influence of civil society actors is significant in the framing of policies, in emerging policy paradigms and in policy implementation.
As in other countries, rapid industrialisation and establishment of heavy industry became the centrepiece of India’s development policy in the 1960s, thereby subordinating environmental conservation (Chopra 2017a). Indian environmental policy has traditionally been shaped, and continues to be shaped, by the growth first paradigm. Following the trajectory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, the “growth first” paradigm assumes that economic growth first increases pollution and then, as per capita income rises, decreases pollution thanks to the implementation of environmental policy (Stern 2004). This seemed to portray the dominant thinking about environmental policy in India. Economic growth and environmentally sustainable development have traditionally been pitted against each other as opposing ends of the debate on environmental policy. The imperative of India’s “growth first” paradigm remained quite unchanged for many decades and subordinated environmental issues including climate change once the phenomenon gained salience (Dubash 2013). This has created an effective barrier for India to follow ambitious environmental policies on a national as well as international level. Moreover, the growth first mantra has prevented India from constructing its own paradigm to promote environmental policies, in general, and climate policies, in particular – an issue that is also faced by other emerging economies. During the 1970s, actors from the industrial sector, large- and medium-sized farms, and India’s middle class were not supportive of environmental protection measures and not willing to bear the costs thereof (Agrawal and Yokozuka 2002). In the 21st century, new advocacy coalitions emerged for protecting the climate and the concept of co-benefits of climate mitigation has become an instrument for identifying social and economic win-win options of greenhouse gas mitigation. However, green economy proponents are still in a weak position in India’s government, political parties, in the corporate sector and civil society. India’s rural actors and communities, rooted in traditional customs and practice, are critical of aggressive economic growth strategies and were considered as proponents for sustainable development (Jasanoff 1993). However, they were unable to significantly change India’s industrialisation agenda.
1.2.3 Livelihoods and social inclusiveness
Many people in India are still directly dependent on natural resources for their subsistence. Large sections of the population still inhabit forests or mountainous regions and are directly affected by environmental degradation but also regulation. Thus, in an international comparative perspective, social, economic and ecological functions of the forests, such as livelihood and natural resources, are of special importance in India’s forest policy. Social justice and the land rights of forest people are major and recurring neglected issues (Kashwan 2017). Both before and after India’s independence, forest policy has been a very important policy subsystem, and the national government has taken on a central role. However, actor constellations have changed recurrently since the 1970s. Varying actor groups, including NGOs, forest dwellers, international donors and actors from the corporate sector, gained access to the policy subsystem. Domestic forest governance is tasked with questions of social justice concerns and customary rights, as well as reconciling environmental aims with social justice and taming economic interests that threaten to undermine the social and ecological dimensions of sustainable forest governance. More broadly, socially inclusive environmental governance has been pursued as a strategy in tangent with decentralisation and participation to empower the local levels and give voice to those formerly excluded from policymaking.
1.2.4 Environmental leapfrogging
Since its independence, India has been consistently committed to technological development (Jasanoff 1993). Under Nehru, a state-governed innovation system for growth was created, which aimed to develop large-scale industrial infrastructures and respective technologies, putting India on a high-carbon development path (Joseph et al. 2014). Since the end of the 1980s, the emergence of India’s renewable energy policy framework has opened up opportunities for low-carbon dev...
