Research area: Environmental Governance and Policy

Understanding the rise of the regulatory state of the South

Summary

We suggest that three aspects of this common context are important in characterizing the rise of the regulatory state of the South. The first contextual element is the presence of powerful external pressures, especially from international financial institutions, to adopt the institutional innovation of regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors. The result is often an incomplete engagement with and insufficient embedding of regulatory agencies within local political and institutional context. A second is the greater intensity of redistributive politics in settings where infrastructure services are of extremely poor quality and often non-existent. The resultant politics of distribution draws in other actors, such as the courts and civil society; regulation is too important to be left to the regulators. The third theme is that of limited state capacity, which we suggest has both “thin” and “thick” dimensions. Thin state capacity issues include prosaic concerns of budget, personnel and training; thick issues address the growing pressures on the state to manage multiple forms of engagement with diverse stakeholders in order to balance competing concerns of growth, efficiency and redistribution. These three themes provide a framework for this special issue, and for the case studies that follow. We focus on regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors (water, electricity and telecoms) as a particular expression of the regulatory state, though we acknowledge that the two are by no means synonymous. The case studies are drawn from India, Colombia, Brazil, and the Philippines, and engage with one or more of these contextual elements. The intent is to draw out common themes that characterize a “regulatory state of the South,” while remaining sensitive to the variations in level of economic development and political institutional contexts within “the South.”

Read more

Toward Enabling and Inclusive Global Environmental Governance

Introduction

Sustainable development has always been a compromise formulation that papered over real conflict between environment and development. Twenty years after Rio, the geopolitical climate is far less conducive to easy compromises. Given an embattled North and a rising South, particularly Asia, the language of zero sum conflict rather than positive sum cooperation is likely to prevail. Green growth offers one way to paper over these conflicts yet again, but it would be prudent to resist this temptation. There is incomplete buy-in to the green growth story, and some in the South are also concerned that this narrative will downgrade poverty alleviation and equity considerations from the sustainable development triad of environment, growth and distribution. In this context, Rio+20 can play a positive role by focusing on national and sub-national institutions and embracing a diversity of national political, institutional and legal contexts; seeking to impose uniformity is likely to chafe. Global efforts can play a supporting role by inducing normative change, stimulate national processes, and provide hooks for domestic policy actors. In addition, Rio+20 should ensure that inclusion of the weakest should remain firmly on the agenda. While the conversations may be difficult, Rio+20 will be most productive if it leads to engagement with fraught geopolitical issues than if, once again, these are papered over.

Read more

The National Environment Assessment and Monitoring Agency: A Step Forward?

Summary

The Ministry of Environment and Forests’ initiative to set up an independent environmental regulator is a positive one and acknowledges the problems in the current system of regulations. Yet, a perusal of the proposal suggests that it has a number of limitations and therefore has to be rejected. But it is equally important that viable alternatives to the proposed agency are actively constructed.

Read more

Mapping Global Energy Governance

Introduction

The challenges inherent in energy policy form an increasingly large proportion of the great issues of global governance. These energy challenges reflect numerous transnational market or governance failures, and their solutions are likely to require a number of global components that can support or constrain national energy policy. Governing energy globally requires approaches that can simultaneously cope with three realities: the highly fragmented and conflictual nature of the current inter-state system’s efforts to govern energy; the diversity of institutions and actors relevant to energy; and the dominance of national processes of energy decision making that are not effectively integrated into global institutions.

Read more

Environmentalism in the Age of Climate Change

Introduction

In this article, Dubash examines the tensions and challenges of Indian – and indeed Southern – environmentalism in an age of climate change. Like no other single issue, climate change has brought environmentalism into the political mainstream. Commerce and finance ministers increasingly register their presence at global environmental negotiations. Climate change is high up the agenda of mainstream global talk shops from the G-8 to Davos. In India, climate change has become a bone of foreign policy contention, and opinion columns are filled with climate commentaries, including by those who have demonstrated little interest in the subject before.

Read more

Regulatory Practice and Politics: Lessons from Independent Regulation in Indian Electricity

Summary

Although independent regulatory agencies are emerging worldwide, there remains little understanding about how they operate in practice, particularly in developing countries. This paper seeks to examine the practice of electricity regulation in India, using case studies of three state-level electricity regulators. Based on documentary analysis and interviews with regulators, government, utilities and stakeholders, the paper examines how regulation is shaped by institutional and political context, how regulators make decisions in practice, and how they engage with stakeholders and with what effects. Based on the Indian experience, we suggest that in a rapidly changing electricity sector, the separation between the political and economic content of regulatory decisions, as is often advocated, may not be feasible or indeed desirable. Instead, we suggest a more proactive regulatory approach where governments give regulators the latitude to proactively steer the sector. For this approach to be viable, regulators need to build adequate technical capacity, institutional legitimacy, and democratic legitimacy in their dealings with stakeholders. This approach entails a bolder, and more challenging vision of regulation, but one that promises greater transformational potential than does the model of technocratic and apolitical regulation.

Read more

A Watershed in Global Governance: An Independent Assessment of the World Commission on Dams

Introduction

The World Commission on Dams (WCD) was a self-styled “experiment” in global public policy-making. It was set up to produce a set of international guidelines for the design, construction, operation and decommissioning of large dams and options on their alternatives. The WCD undertook this task over two years, with a pledge to be independent, transparent, inclusive and representative of a diverse body of stakeholders. Participants in the process have included dam-building companies, multilateral development banks, affected people’s groups and other non-governmental organizations, private consultants, and the public at large.

Read more