India and Climate Change: Evolving Ideas and Increasing Policy Engagement

Abstract

India is a significant player in climate policy and politics. It has been vocal in international climate negotiations, but its role in these negotiations has changed over time. In an interactive relationship between domestic policy and international positions, India has increasingly become a testing ground for policies that internalize climate considerations into development. This article critically reviews the arc of climate policy and politics in India over time. It begins by examining changes in knowledge and ideas around climate change in India, particularly in the areas of ethics, climate impacts, India's energy transition, linkages with sustainability, and sequestration. The next section examines changes in politics, policy, and governance at both international and national scales. The article argues that shifts in ideas and knowledge of impacts, costs, and benefits of climate action and shifts in the global context are reflected and refracted through discourses in India's domestic and international policies.

India’s Engagement in Global Climate Negotiations from Rio to Paris

“…Intense negotiations, particularly by the BASIC and LMDC groups, throughout the months leading up to COP 21 ensured that ideas of 'equity' and 'differentiation' remained registered in different operational parts of this new treaty-and India played a key role in this process. Ultimately, the Paris Agreement agreed to at COP 21-with its nuanced and 'carefully calibrated mix of hard, soft and non-obligations' (Rajamani 2016: 337) and its 'sovereigntypreserving NDCs' (Dubash et al 2018)-arguably took into account at least some of India's core concerns. Nevertheless, it represented a clear shift from the UNFCCC/KP framework in its much more symmetrical treatment of all parties, developed and developing alike, than had previously been the case, which India-ultimately in the end-was left with little choice but to acquiesce to.…”

“…Fourth, domestic consensus on climate change within India is no longer as solid and unidimensional as it used to be (Dubash et al 2018). Until the mid-2000s, the landscape of non-state actors working on this issue was dominated largely by institutions such as CSE and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), whose views were largely congruent with, and even helped to shape, India's traditional positions.…”

Towards Lower-Carbon Indian Agricultural Development: An Experiment in Multi-criteria Mapping

“…The alternative explored here is MCA. With origins in military logistics in the Second World War, developed in psychology and engineering and now being applied in policymaking and consultation, MCA is a class of decision-analytical tools developed for evaluative criteria-or 'co-benefits' (Dubash, Khosla, Kelkar, & Lele, 2018;Dubash, Raghunandan, Sant, & Sreenivas, 2013). Such criteria are incommensurable, abundant and may conflict.…”

Climate Change and India’s Forests

“…Official estimates include all tree cover (including monocultural plantations in forest lands as well as horticultural crops in private lands), which results in a rising 'forest cover' trend, while only natural tree cover shows a declining trend (Reddy et al 2016). Second, the official estimates include the amount of sequestration due to growth in forests that remained forests (termed FL-FL) and addition in carbon due to conversion of non-forest to forest (termed L-FL); but they appear not to include the carbon emissions from forest to non-forest transitions (termed FL-L), which are non-zero (Dubash et al 2018). Third, there is variation within official estimates themselves: the Forest Survey of India (FSI) data show declining growing stock for most of 2003-13 in spite of stable or increasing forest cover, but national communications have come up with a positive trend (MoEFCC 2012, 2015b).…”