Climate Change: Policy, Institutional, and Legal Framework

Abstract

Transforming towards a low-carbon, climate-resilient society will require reimagining existing governance arrangements. This chapter in ‘The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Natural Resources Law in India‘ documents how India’s policies, institutions, and legal structures have changed in response to climate change. These developments have been opportunistic in character, with policy changes preceding institutional development. Policies are many and widespread, therefore, but lack strategic coherence. A more deliberate approach would bring with it enhanced governance requirements, including new structures for coordination, deliberation, and strategy-setting. This chapter pays attention to the prospects for climate law in India in this context, discussing different approaches to constructing firmer legal foundations for climate action.

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SFC Perspectives on Adaptation and Resilience, Climate Policy, Energy Transitions, and Environmental Governance and Policy

Overview

SFC Perspectives are intended to stimulate discussion by providing an overview of key issues and avenues for action to inform India’s sustainable development trajectory.

Read our Perspectives on:

1. Adaptation and Resilience: Building systems that allow India to adapt to climate impacts (by Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Tamanna Dalal)
2. Perspectives on Climate Policy: Embedding a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking (by Aman Srivastava, Easwaran J Narassimhan and Navroz K Dubash)
3. Enabling the Energy Transition: Technology, politics & institutions in India’s energy system (by Ashwini K Swain, Sarada Prasanna Das, Suravee Nayak, Catherine Ayallore and Navroz K Dubash)
4. Perspectives on Environmental Governance and Policy: Systemic transformations to limit the health burden of air pollution (by Bhargav Krishna, Shibani Ghosh, Arunesh Karkun and Annanya Mahajan)

Perspectives on Climate Policy: Embedding a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking

Introduction

India is a rapidly growing country pursuing a range of challenging development objectives. Its continued growth and development – particularly in the face of a changing climate – will likely involve large structural shifts in its patterns of growth, urbanisation, and employment. Against the backdrop of this uncertain future pathway, India has also committed to decarbonising its economy over a multi-decadal timescale. To this end, it has instituted multiple targets and policies in relevant sectors, layering in further measures over time in response to evolving conditions. This approach has enabled the country to partially decouple its growth from emissions and grow its renewable electricity generation capacity over the last decade.

Like most countries, India has hitherto taken an opportunity-siezing approach to climate mitigation,green growth, and green industrialisation. But realising greater climate and development benefits requires coalescing these efforts into a strategic approach to low-carbon development that also builds climate resilience. Doing so can present significant opportunities to synergistically achieve these environmental and developmental benefits – navigating shifts in global economic conditions and the ongoing energy transition. Because the strategy-setting, coordination, and consensus building requirements of such a transition are large, such a strategy requires a capable state with a development-centric, climate-ready approach to policymaking. Such a policymaking approach requires 1) modelling capacities to estimate low-carbon pathways and their development implications; 2) institutions capable of coordinating and mainstreaming climate considerations to achieve greater coherence; 3) bureaucracies that work with industry to devise green industrial policy strategies; and 4) the ability to nudge and harness a financing ecosystem to steer investments towards low-carbon development (See Figure 1). A development-centric climate-ready approach to policymaking also requires revisiting the relative roles of the state and markets in steering the country’s low-carbon pathway and addressing problems of the global commons. The identification and appropriateness of these choices for the Indian context merits further study.

The Climate Policy group within SFC approaches policy challenges through a strategic lens, aiming for long-term structural change by shifting discourse, building stronger institutions, and aligning conditions for implementation.

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