Manu V. Mathai

Elements of an Alternative to Nuclear Power as a Response to the Energy-Environment Crisis in India: Development as Freedom and a Sustainable Energy Utility.

Even as the conventional energy system is fundamentally challenged by the “energy-environment crisis,” its adherents have presented the prospect of “abundant” and purportedly “green” nuclear power as part of a strategy to address the crisis. Surveying the development of nuclear power in India, this article finds that it is predisposed to centralization and secrecy, that nuclear power as energy policy is based on a presumption that overabundance is imperative for viable forms of social and economic development; its institutionalization has tended to reduce deliberations on energy policy and human well-being to narrowly technocratic terms. Given these proclivities, nuclear power, as evaluated in this article, is considered unlikely to facilitate a viable response to the energy-environment crisis. Alternatives are thus surveyed here to include the sustainable energy utility and the capability approach as well as synergies between them, to challenge the offer of nuclear power as a response to the energy-environment crisis.

Towards a Sustainable Synergy: End-Use Energy Planning, Development as Freedom, Inclusive Institutions and Democratic Technics

Even as modern energy-society relations have produced unprecedented economic growth, they have ushered in a crisis of social inequality and ecologically unsustainable levels of resource and energy throughput. Despite the persistence of these drivers and impacts, conventional environmental responses interpret this crisis as insufficiently advanced modernity and prioritize more economic growth and more efficient technology. This conventional strategy represents a very narrow engagement with values and instead relies on technological optimism. It perpetuates the detachment of development and energy planning from democratic deliberation about ends. As such, it is an important enabler of the environmental crisis. In this light, the chapter identifies and discusses alternatives strategies and considers the synergy between them. The alternatives discussed include the DEFENDUS approach for energy planning, the Human Development and Capability Approach and the Sustainable Energy Utility as an institutional template. Together, along with “democratic technics,” these alternatives can offer avenues to resist “more of the same” as a response to the environmental crisis. They invite us to critically reconsider the ends of growth and development and reclaim human-centered imagination and creativity for charting more sustainable and equitable realities.

Institutional Framework for Low-Carbon Urban Infrastructure Investment: Some Evidence and Lessons from DKI Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract This paper proffers an extension of an institutional framework for guiding low-carbon urban infrastructure investment. It reads the “low-carbon societies” discourse as an expression of Ecological Modernization Theory (EMT), and assesses it using Daerah Khusus Ibukota (DKI) Jakarta as a case study, along with a complementary survey of macro analyses of the effectiveness of ecological modernization strategies. The paper finds that DKI Jakarta, as expected of the low-carbon societies discourse emergent from EMT, has a well-developed plan and institutional framework for pursuing improvements in the intensity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, despite ensuing mitigation targets and organizational changes, projections of overall carbon emissions for DKI Jakarta by 2030 are likely to exceed levels deemed to be sustainable and equitable. In response this paper suggests that the institutional framework for guiding low-carbon urban infrastructure investment must complement its prioritization of efficiency strategies with an engagement with the idea of sufficiency and its eventual enactment. This is a challenging proposal given the dominance of industrial capitalism and the related trend that David Harvey termed “entrepreneurialism” in urban governance. This realization calls for theoretical and practical innovations in climate governance. An economic development framework responding to these demands is discussed and suggestions for an institutional framework to guide low-carbon urban infrastructure investment are considered.