Kanchan Chopra

Looming global-scale failures and missing institutions

Navigating global changes requires a coevolving set of collaborative, global institutions. Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.

Nature: the many benefits of ecosystem services.

Back to nature?In aCommentary in Nature last month, Douglas J. McCauley argued that with little evidence to show that market-based conservation works, the time was ripe for a return to the protection of nature for natures sake. Predictably this has provoked comment, and in Correspondence this week, the issues are aired.

Quick Fixes for the Environment: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?

All such problems require immediate action to minimize suffering but are often aggravated by the gradual effects of previous shortsighted policies. These problems combine complex ecological mechanisms with difficult sociopolitical dilemmas. They are characterized by periodic, unpredictable events, creating a difficult choice between short-run responses that address symptoms—“quick fixes”—and more fundamental changes in our economy and lifestyles that remove or reduce the long-run drivers of the problems.

Climate Change Policy in India

This chapter positions the climate change policy of India as having been driven by international compulsions. Right up to the 1990s, it was not a domestic priority. It suited us to relegate climate change to the position of a developed country problem. India held that climate change had been caused by the developed world and should be solved by them. This position fitted into our perception of equity as a significant cornerstone of India’s development policy, both domestically and internationally. This chapter reviews how changes in this stance took place more to fit into the changing international scenario and by the need to be perceived as a forward-looking nation. The participation in Clean Development Mechanism in 2005, the drawing up of the National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2008 and the acceptance in Cancun in 2010 that ‘all countries must take binding commitments, under appropriate legal forms’ constituted significant turning points. Policymakers need to continue to engage simultaneously with the domestic and international constituencies and chart a path of growth which reconciles the two contradicting perceptions. India is gradually moving in that direction with focus on reducing energy intensity, on renewable energy and on low-carbon growth.

Economic Systems and Ecosystems: Interlinkages, Co-evolution or Disparate Movement?

This chapter examines the interlinkages between economic systems and ecosystems. It maintains that the functioning of economic systems has not reflected adequately the role of nature’s categories, ecosystems. While both natural and socio-economic systems can be viewed as complex adaptive systems, there is an urgent need to manage better the disparate movement between them. Two approaches are postulated for doing this. In the first, independently generated scientific knowledge is used in the framework of risk analysis and management to set limits on the domain of economic systems. In the second, economic decision-making is strengthened by attempting to put a value on hitherto unvalued ecosystem services provided to humans. We argue that the two approaches can be used in different contexts and also complement each other in some. However, underlying both is an ethical concern with services and well-being in the future, both of the human and non-human species. Whichever approach we adopt, a stable co-evolution between economic and ecosystems will take place only when such a concern is reached in the form of accepted social norms reflected in policy.

Development and Environmental Policy

This brief is motivated by a set of questions asked within the context of the policy framework in India. Did the policy move in the direction of recognition of the different roles played by the environment? Were corresponding acts and rules passed to enable implementation? In this introductory chapter, we begin with a brief foray into the nature of development, an idea that has dominated the public space for at least the last seven decades. The next section examines the nature of policy responses, one particular subset of human responses to an issue. It also looks at the decision-making cycle and its internalisation of stakeholder responses through an iterative process. This analysis is then viewed in the context of linked sociological systems. The latter sections examine the development process in India and the evolution of environmental issues as areas of concern as development proceeded. Turning points in the evolution of environmental policy are examined and possible drivers identified.

Land and Forest Policy: Resources for Development or Our Natural Resources?

Land and forest resources have been at the centre of several policy interventions in India over a long period of time: policy declarations, acts and rules as well as incentivising and restraining tax and subsidy structures. Field reality observed by social scientists and their natural science counterparts has also been documented extensively in the last three to four decades. The questions we ask in this chapter are: Has the policy direction been impacted by the understandings from this literature? What is the empirical learning policy link? Who are the stakeholders who count?

Rights-Based Approaches: Do Environmental Movements Make a Dent on Policy?

Environmental movements replace deliberation and adjudication by the language of rights, livelihoods or value systems. They usually bring together like-minded stakeholders on issues of common interest. Drawing from the documentation for India, this chapter addresses the following issues: What role can such environmental movements play in the formulation of policy and through what channels? Further, what role have they played in the last three decades in India? Significant environmental movements are analysed from the viewpoint of the impact they have had. Further, impact is defined in three ways, each of which has the potential of initiating an iterative process that influences decision-making in the future. An immediate impact could be in terms of an act passed by the parliament or an executive order influencing the project at hand. Alternatively, impact may be on sectoral policy or the manner in which future projects are evaluated or granted approval. Finally, a change in the macro policy environment could occur which results in a mainstreaming of environmental issues.

Does a Good Knowledge Base Influence Policy-Making

Can the absence of good policy be attributed to the absence of a good theoretical understanding? Or is it that we need to understand the impact of knowledge at different levels, initially on policy as drafted in an overarching manner, and then on the drawing up of rules and laws which govern actual affects at the project and grassroots levels? This chapter examines these issues. It looks at different theoretical understandings of the environment and evaluates their effect, if any, on environmental policy, as well as on the details of laws and rules which give form to that policy. It first distinguishes between theory, models and frameworks. Postulating then that, at times, overarching concepts capture public attention more than detailed frameworks, the chapter then evaluates the policy impact of concepts such as sustainable development, resilience and vulnerability. It also examines the possibility of radical approaches such as de-growth and radical ecological democracy impacting policy. Recent developments in India such as the formulation of the National Environmental Policy, the Forest Rights Act and the move towards low-carbon growth and green accounting are seen as positive developments. On the whole, however, the Indian agenda on environment stands at the crossroads. Two kinds of processes are operating, albeit at different rates. There does exist a gradual understanding in different sections of the impending environmental crises. Other elements in the system, moving at a much faster pace, demand faster growth in the shorter run. These are driven by unconstrained market forces, irresponsible industrialisation and urbanisation. We do not know which way the balance will tilt.

Shrimp Exports, Environment and Human Well-being in the Sunderbans, West Bengal

While some argue that trade liberalization has raised incomes and led to environmental protection in developing countries, others claim that it generates neither poverty reduction nor sustainability. The detailed case studies in this book demonstrate that neither interpretation is universally correct, given how much depends on specific policies and institutions that determine ‘on-the-ground’ outcomes. Drawing on research from six countries around the developing world, the book also presents the unique perspectives of researchers at both the world’s largest development organization (The World Bank) and the world’s largest conservation organization (World Wildlife Fund) on the debate over trade liberalization and its effects on poverty and the environment.