Environmental Governance and Activism in a Democratic Regime: Discourses from India
Edited version published in IIAS Newsletter, and can be found at the following link:
In the past, Environmental Governance in India has not been very structured and consistent. It has been a magnanimous experimentation of policies and legislations involving a multitude of actors. Although the Government in India plays an imperative role in devising policies that could foster a regime shift, but institutional and political aspects form major barriers when it comes to transition and upscaling. All these actors contribute and play a major role in impacting the environmental governance of a country and fostering a country towards transition to a sustainable future. Often, in a democratic regime, environmental activism and non-state actors play a vital role in shaping the environmental policy.
Introduction
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, in his “The Discovery of India” calls India as “an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously”(Nehru 1889–1964, 1946).
This eclectic mishmash of thought and reverie had a considerable impact on the governance structure as well, which eventually impacts the development policies and the institutional framework. Today, India is one of the world’s fastest growing economy. The transition from a drought and famine ridden poor country, to one of the world’s fastest growing economy has been a tough one. Many developing countries like India now face the challenge of making their cities both ecological and economically sustainable. There are some critical challenges for the Indian cities in future. The cities in future need to continue to tackle and channelize the aspects responsible for poverty and growth offered by urbanization and at the same time, they need to mitigate the negative impacts of urbanization so that the cities can cope up with the future scale of urbanization, considering their own limitations and capacities. Cities are facing a decay, due to promulgating haphazard urbanization and lack of implementation of development control guidelines. There is a need to restructure and reexamine the existing institutional and policy structure in the multi-hierarchical environmental governance regime of India.
Environmental Policies in India and their historical discourses
In Article 48 of the Directive Principles of State Policy[1], it is stated that every state shall endeavor to protect and improve the environment and safeguard the forests and wildlife. Article 51-A further emphasizes upon the duties of citizens of India to protect and improve the natural environment. India is one of the members of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) treaty. Prior to the CBD, India had different laws for Environmental Protection. Indian Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 protected India’s biodiversity. The 1988 National Forest Policy stressed on conservation as one of the principles. Subsequently, the Environment Act 1986 was passed by the Government for control of biodiversity.
Since 1980s, the Supreme Court of India[2] has been very active in India’s environmental issues. The Supreme Court has been engaged in introducing and interpreting new changes in environmental laws. The court has devised new principles, environmental laws, institutional framework, and conferred additional powers on existing authorities through judgments and directions.
The popular discourse behind deliberation of environmental governance in India is rooted in the opinion that environmental governance in India has emerged as a response to global initiatives and external discourses influenced the regime. This negates the long-term vision of policy makers[3].An alternate discourse has been that the social movements in India have acted as a driving force behind demands for governance[4],scholars like Kohli [5]accede this opinion and state that societal forces have contributed prominently to the evolution of governance in India.
The first significant observation with respect to environmental governance has been by Indira Gandhi in 1972 in The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE)[6], where she famously observed “Environment cannot be developed in the condition of poverty, the major cause and effect of global environmental problems. Hence the new development paradigm is growth with equity, stability and sustainability.” In the following years, the National Planning Commission of India[7] was instituted in 1950 with economic development as the primary objective and its first task was to prepare the ‘Five-year Plans’ (FYP) for fulfilling its intended aim. In its nascent stage, the FYPs focused more on development rather than environmental management, however, the fourth FYP (1969–1974), a special mention for the need of environmental protection was highlighted and promoting the development along with environment was stressed(Government of India, 1969)(Government of India, 1969)(Government of India, 1969). In the aftermath of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy on December 3,1984 the environmental activism in India increased drastically[8] , this was a landmark event in the environmental history of India as the inadequacy of the then governance structure in preventing the disaster and the legal and administrative procedures pertaining to compensation to the affected people stirred people’s awareness towards environmental negligence[9].This was one of the major factors contributing towards the formation of The Environmental Protection Act 1986 in tandem with the formation of a central level authority: the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF)[10], now the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC),for strengthening environmental governance in India. This was followed by numerous legislations and acts to further strengthen the environmental policy and law in India. In lieu with the previous policies, the MoEF launched the National Environmental Policy (NEP) in 2006. A timeline of environmental policy developments has been illustrated in Figure 1.
The NEP 2006 was drafted with the context of filling in the gaps that still exist despite the cumulative experiences and knowledge, and it pursued to build on the previous policies instead of negating them. The NEP was also drafted keeping in mind the nation’s commitment to environment as mandated by the Constitution of India[11].The main objectives of NEP is to improve environmental conditions while fostering the economy of the nation. It also endorses recognition of environmental concerns within development activities while categorizing utilitarian reforms. However, while the regulatory mechanisms for environmental governance in India has meticulous statutes and regulations on almost every plausible aspect, yet, the implementation and monitoring capabilities are weak, this is due to the segregation of duties when it comes to environmental policymaking between national, state and local governments[12] (Gupta, 2014)(Gupta, 2014)(Gupta, 2014). Apart from these, the environmental governance also involves a multitude of different actors: State Institutions, International Organizations and Civil Society which has been used as a collective term for Non-Governmental Organizations(NGOs), Grass-root organizations, Community based organizations, Civil society organizations, Universities. However, there is overlapping of some terminology concerning the terms NGOs, grass-root organizations, and civil society organizations in terms of their purview[13].
It has been mentioned that the grassroots and community organizations explicitly refer to the local level, but civil society can denote groups at any level, including global[14]. One of the important goals of a deliberative governance is to inclusivity for the voices of its citizens who continue to feel excluded from the policy process[15]. Consequently, a democracy usually attempts a decision making by directly engaging citizens and experts in the deliberation[16].These citizens are also part of the civil society. The associations within the civil society have been explored in previous researches and has discussed provocation of citizens to reflect on collective futures[17], Citizens have been labelled as mostly passive, mobilized by political movements[18]. The passive portrayal of citizens in India is viewed as true as there is no legal mechanism for consultation with all the stakeholders affected by a particular law. This gap between the government mechanisms and the citizens is often bridged by intermediary organisations like think tanks which have been considered a voice on behalf of the citizens in government practices. These think tanks are pivotal agencies for challenges in policy making and perceived as institutions of lobbying[19]. There has been a recognition that civil society organizations can contribute to creating discursive spaces for people and give them an inclusive platform for policies concerning them. The creation of new spaces for this policy deliberation has been marked as a space between the government’s invited and civil society’s invented spaces(Cornwall, 2004; McGee, 2004) and have been hailed as democratic spaces[20] and are intermediate as they act at the boundary between the society and the state. In India, they are intermediary spaces acting as channels for a dialogue. These organizations may be funded and organized by the state, maybe acknowledged by the state actors where citizens are invited and there is total inclusivity.
Environmental and urbanization issues in India, complex governance, and the democratic regime.
According to a recent report by The Times of India, India is one of the worst performers in Global Environmental Index. India is among the bottom five countries on the Environmental Performance Index 2018, plummeting 36 points from 141 in 2016, according to a biennial report by Yale and Columbia Universities along with the World Economic Forum. India is at the bottom of the list in the environmental health category, it ranks 168 in the 12th edition of the biennial Environment Performance Index (EPI Index 2020)[21]. Many of the environmental concerns stem from the urbanization problems in India.
The problem of urbanization is very critical in India. India accounts for nearly 16 percent of the world’s total human population with only 2.5 percent of the total geographic area[22].The percentage of urbanization in the country has also increased rapidly over the years. Currently, India’s urban population is about 377 million people, which is almost 30 % of the total population (India’s Urban Demographic Transition The 2011 Census Results (Provisional), 2011). The increase is with a growth of 3.3 percent points during 2001–2011[23] . Urban population of India will almost reach 600 million by 2031[24]. This rapid urbanization in India has transformed the urban landscape thereby leading to several environmental problems. It is expected through these projections that Indian cities will suffer from severe environmental degradation and unhealthy living conditions. Often, cities in a developing country have informal and complex governance structures with multiple tiers of governing institutions. In India, the government is a type of federal structure, comprising many institutions at various tiers of governance. Several attempts have been made to study the complex governance structure of India. India’s federal structure places urban services provision at the central and state levels, with limited control for urban local bodies outside of implementation[25].The governance in Indian cities is marked by a complex arrangement of laws, which involve municipal and non-municipal institutions with tangled jurisdictions.
With such expected projections and the existing institutional mechanism, it becomes essential that the institutions are efficient, functional, and work in tandem with each other. The bureaucracy and public administration in India show a considerable influence of the British administrative system. The central government functions as an institution of utmost importance as it provides financing, the States determine the roles and financial capabilities of their urban governments and manage other para-statal bodies such as water supply boards, pollution control boards and development authorities. This hierarchy in the Governance structure attributes to the delay in plan formulation and implementation as the Government is restructured every 5 years.
India is the biggest democracy in the world, with a population of over 1 billion. The Preamble to the Indian constitution defines India as a sovereign socialist, secular, democratic, republic with a parliamentary system of government. India became a republic on 26th January 1950. India became a democratic republic which provides equal fundamental rights to all its citizens. The constitution grants equal rights to all the citizens of India, and in such a scenario, the civil society is also one of the prominent actors in a democratic regime. Therefore, a range of informal and formal institutions perform different roles in various perspectives and needs of several socio-economic groups[26]. The participation, deliberation and advocacy of a civil society is illustrated in Figure 2.
Whether or not the democratic regime has a direct and influential impact on India’s environmental laws is yet to be properly evaluated, given that India faces greater challenges than any other Asian country because of its diverse nature, politically, economically, and socially. It is not easy to tackle the magnitude of challenges which India is currently facing.
Some major incidents in the past have been eye-openers for the Indian Government to modify its environmental laws, for example, The Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984 saw an immediate rise in activism from local groups as well as nationwide institutions. This led to the formation of Environment Protection Act of 1986. But even after this, its current development strategy is increasingly disputed along lines of ecological Considerations. India’s transition to sustainability still has a long way to go as compared to the western counterparts.
Due to various national trends, there has been a tremendous growth in citizen’s groups that campaign for environmental protection and improvement. There are numerous Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) and community initiatives working towards environmental cause actively. India’s democratic rights have given the liberty to the citizens to raise a voice against environmental hazards and the inefficiency of Government to tackle them. There have been various success stories as well, such as the Delhi government’s initiative to replace petrol and diesel in the public vehicles with Compressed Natural Gas(CNG), which was driven by public interest litigations and a public campaign for clean air and health which had gathered momentum in the later part of the 1990s. Following this, the Supreme Court issued several judicial mandates to ensure the implementation of the initiative in Delhi.
Discussion and Conclusion
This short overview looks at the environmental policy deliberation process in India in mostly post-partition India (After 1947) with an attempt to provide an insight on the formulation of environmental policy in a democratic regime. The democratic space for civil society in India has always existed and has been influential in the formation of environmental policies. There are multiple actors involved which can be collectively grouped into the term ‘civil society’ for example: NGOs, Universities, Think-tank agencies and Research Institutes. These actors may or may not be affiliated to the state. The Bhopal Gas disaster can be hailed as a milestone in the policy deliberation process which lead to pressure on the regime and eventual formulation of new institutions. The establishment of a specialized judicial body, the National Green Tribunal has brought the reach of environmental justice closer. The regulatory regime for protection of the environment in India is contrasting. The country has elaborate regulations on every environmental aspect, but the monitoring and enforcement capabilities remain weak.
The issue of corruption in public life, the role of civil society participation due to the absence of an accountability mechanism remains an issue in the formulation of draft policy procedures. There is also an increasing incidence of conflicts between civil society institutions and governments. These systems face policy obstacles in the functions about formation of organizations[27]. To ensure public participation in the policy process, civil society must be considered as a functional feature of a democracy, and their participatory roles must be defined in the draft plans to institutionalize their activity.
The present context of environmental governance in an international purview deals with international organizations, international law, and a financing mechanism. Civil societies play an important role in the domestic aspect. The traditional recognition of civil societies has always been attributed to NGOs but the evidence from the reviewed literature shows that the term could also be applied to a few other actors such as non-state institutions. Civil societies are equated with democratization, pluralism and liberalism and have proven as essential pillars for proper functioning of a democracy. In the context of environmental decision making, it is very essential that the democratic legitimacy be emphasized. Since scientific temper is not equally distributed among all the strata of society, it makes one unaware of the environmental problems and its consequences. Civil societies can play an important role in environmental education, thereby bridging this gap, and civil societies in India have a huge potential to mitigate the environmental issues due to increasing environmental problems. Right efforts are required to ensure civil society participation in environmental policy making.
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