Navroz Dubash

Centre for Policy Research, Environmental Law and Governacne, Faculty Member

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Papers by Navroz Dubash

Multilateral Diplomacy on Climate Change

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 10, 2010

This chapter reviews India’s foreign policy on climate change, arguing that while it is marked by... more This chapter reviews India’s foreign policy on climate change, arguing that while it is marked by tactical virtuosity, it increasingly exhibits strategic vacuity. The chapter traces the evolution of India’s role in international climate negotiations, noting particularly India’s key role in highlighting equity and enshrining the concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ as a cornerstone of the negotiation process. The chapter then examines the turbulent phase from 2007 onwards, when India, along with other large developing country allies, experimented with new articulations of climate policy. This discussion explores the emergent drivers of Indian climate policy, including international pressures, shifting domestic political context, the emergence of ‘co-benefits’ as a framing concept, and the role of key personalities. The chapter concludes by suggesting that an exclusive emphasis on an equitable climate deal should transition to an approach that provides equal attention to equity and effectiveness in international climate outcomes.

India and Climate Change: Evolving Ideas and Increasing Policy Engagement

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Oct 17, 2018

India is a significant player in climate policy and politics. It has been vocal in international ... more 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.

Climate Governance and Federalism in India

Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 25, 2023

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From Margins to Mainstream? State Climate Change Planning in India as a 'Door Opener' to a Sustainable Future

Social Science Research Network, 2014

ABSTRACT Climate change is likely to hinder India’s achievement of development objectives, unders... more ABSTRACT Climate change is likely to hinder India’s achievement of development objectives, underscoring the need to dovetail climate planning in larger national and sub-national policy processes. In 2009, the government of India requested states to develop State Action Plans on Climate Change. Based on a detailed analysis of five state climate plans, this article finds that climate plans provide an important institutional platform to mainstream concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning but fail to update ideas of sustainability to include climate resilience. There are shortcomings in approach, process, formulation of outcomes, and implementation efforts. These shortcomings are united by a common thread – a tendency to prematurely view state climate plans as vehicles for generating implementable actions rather than an opportunity to re-direct development toward climate resilience. However, if state plans are viewed as the beginning of a complex process of updating sustainable development planning rather than as an end in themselves, they provide a foundation upon which climate concerns can be more effectively mainstreamed in local development planning.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities

Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Oct 17, 2017

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conducts policyrelevant but not policy-presc... more The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conducts policyrelevant but not policy-prescriptive assessments of climate science. In this review, we engage with some of the key design features, achievements, and challenges that situate and characterize the IPCC as an intergovernmental organization that is tasked with producing global environmental assessments (GEAs). These include the process of working through consensus to assess and summarize climate science and the need to include knowledge from as many of the 195 IPCC nation-states as possible, despite the structural inequalities between developed and developing countries. To highlight salient features that are unique to the IPCC but that offer lessons for other organizations that conduct GEAs, we include case studies on the politics of climate denialism, the use of geoengineering in mitigation scenarios, and

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Revisiting climate ambition: The case for prioritizing current action over future intent

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Oct 23, 2019

Growing concerns that it may indeed be too late to address climate change have led to calls for u... more Growing concerns that it may indeed be too late to address climate change have led to calls for urgent action from scientists, governments and citizens. To understand how these calls may be useful requires exploring how they are mediated by both global and national climate governance architectures. Globally, the Paris Agreement architecture is premised on a learning by doing logic that prioritizes experimentation. National governance mechanisms have emerged in reaction to such international processes, but are deeply shaped by local contexts. National systems differ in the narratives on which they are based, their institutional forms, and the resultant interests mobilized. Specifically, they differ in the centrality of climate change itself to national narratives of action and, instead, often embed climate motivations within other national objectives. As a result, calls for enhanced ambition can have different effects depending on how they are framed, and therefore how amenable they are to being internalized nationally. In particular, ambition understood predominantly as enhanced quantitative pledges could yield perverse outcomes truncating the learning by doing dynamic of the Paris Agreement; returning the focus of global political attention disproportionately to a burden-sharing discussion; creating incentives for gaming pledges; and stretching scarce implementation capacity in the developing world. More flexible framings that can harness ambition to accelerated experimentation, broader coalitions, and synergies with other objectives can be fruitful. Questions such as "is it too late?" are useful if they encourage action and learning by doing; less so if they shift attention to future intent over current action.

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Institutional Transplant as Political Opportunity: The Practice and Politics of Indian Electricity Regulation

Social Science Research Network, 2008

India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an ... more India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention.

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Revisiting electricity reform: The case for a sustainable development approach

Utilities Policy, Sep 1, 2003

Debates over reform and restructuring of the electricity sector worldwide are typically focused o... more Debates over reform and restructuring of the electricity sector worldwide are typically focused on technical and economic concerns. This paper argues for a wider perspective on electricity reforms, one that explicitly examines social and environmental outcomes. The paper shows how electricity reform in the developing world has been driven primarily by financial concerns. It then examines changes in the electricity sector in the context of larger globalization debates. This framing of the issue sets the stage for a discussion of the social and environmental considerations in electricity reform.

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Climate Change through the Lens of Energy Transformation

The MIT Press eBooks, Apr 29, 2016

Viewpoint – Reflections on the WCD as a Mechanism of Global Governance

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2010

The World Commission on Dams (WCD) has aroused debate as an innovation in global governance. I su... more The World Commission on Dams (WCD) has aroused debate as an innovation in global governance. I suggest that the WCD did, indeed, have many innovative features, but argue that processes such as the WCD are better suited to propagating norms than making rules at the global level. The norm setting and propagating role is critical because there are no other plausible mechanisms of debating the larger ideas that inform decision-making, in a way that credibly brings in voices of the poor and powerless. I develop this argument by looking at three aspects of the WCD: its characteristics as a global governance mechanism; how it sought to achieve legitimacy; and its role as an agent of regulative versus normative change.

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Electric Power Reform: Social and Environmental Issues

Elsevier eBooks, 2004

The new regulatory politics of electricity in India: embryonic ground for consumer action

Journal of Consumer Policy, Jan 4, 2007

Newly created regulatory bodies in India are the site for emergent consumer politics around elect... more Newly created regulatory bodies in India are the site for emergent consumer politics around electricity. Forged as a means of attracting private capital, these bodies have nonetheless become potential spaces for consumer and citizen engagement around electricity. The nature of this emergent space is examined by developing three narratives around emergent regulatory institutions-apolitical and independent regulation, regulation as captured by the state, and regulation as contested political space. Recent examples of consumer and citizen action on electricity, and particularly protests over a tariff hike following privatisation in Delhi, suggest that regulation as an institution is poised between being absorbed into politics as usual and creating a genuinely new space for consumer action and political engagement in India.

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A watershed in global governance? An independent assessment of the World Commission on Dams (Executive Summary)

Politics and the Life Sciences, Mar 1, 2002

In mid-2000, Medha Patkar, a leader of one of the best-known social movements in India, and Goran... more In mid-2000, Medha Patkar, a leader of one of the best-known social movements in India, and Goran Lindahl, the Chief Executive Officer of one of the world's largest engineering firms, participated in a meeting together in Cape Town. The two came from different worlds. Patkar was weak from undertaking a hunger strike to protest a dam on the Narmada River in western India. Lindahl arrived at the last minute on his private jet. Before their meeting, Patkar animatedly described the recent protests, showed Lindahl pictures of the villagers, and narrated their experiences.

From Margins to Mainstream?

Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 21, 2019

In 2009, the Government of India requested states to develop State Action Plans on Climate Change... more In 2009, the Government of India requested states to develop State Action Plans on Climate Change. Based on a detailed analysis of five state climate plans, this article finds that climate plans provide an important institutional platform to mainstream concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning but fail to update ideas of sustainability to include climate resilience. There are shortcomings in approach, process, formulation of outcomes, and implementation efforts. These shortcomings are united by a common thread – a tendency to prematurely view state climate plans as vehicles for generating implementable actions rather than an opportunity to redirect development towards climate resilience. However, if state plans are viewed as the beginning of a complex process of updating sustainable development planning rather than as an end in themselves, they provide a foundation upon which climate concerns can be more effectively mainstreamed in local development planning.

The Institutionalisation of Climate Policy in India: Designing a Development-Focused, Co-Benefits Based Approach

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Jun 1, 2015

While there is growing attention to climate policy, effective coordination, design and implementa... more While there is growing attention to climate policy, effective coordination, design and implementation of policy require attention to institutional design for climate governance. This paper examines the case of India, organized around three periods: pre-2007; 2007-2009 and 2010-mid-2014, providing institutional charts for each. Several key themes emerge. First, the formation of climate institutions have frequently been driven by international negotiations, even while filtered through domestic context. Second, once established, institutions tend not to be stable or long-lasting. Third, while various efforts at knowledge generation have been attempted, they do not add up to a mechanism for sustained and consistent strategic thinking on climate change. Fourth, coordination across government has been uneven and episodic, reaching a high point with a specialised envoy in the Prime Minister's Office. Fifth, the overall capacity within government, in terms of specialised skills and sheer numbers of personnel remains limited. Sixth, capacity shortfalls are exacerbated by closed structures of governance that only partially draw on external expertise. Seventh, institutional structures are not explicitly designed to enable India's stated objective of climate policy in the context of development, which implies specific attention to co-benefits and mainstreaming.

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An Introduction to India’s Evolving Climate Change Debate

Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 21, 2019

Climate change has been evocatively described as a 'wicked' problemit has no unambiguous definiti... more Climate change has been evocatively described as a 'wicked' problemit has no unambiguous definition, is riven with scientific uncertainty, and proposed solutions are complicated by their embedding in social, political, and economic systems (Hulme 2009). If climate change is an environmental issue for some people, for others it is predominantly about justice and equity, and for yet others, it is largely an economic and technical challenge. In contrast with 'tame' problems, even the problem definition is fraught, and, therefore, how we discuss and debate climate change is a challenge; differences in interests are further confounded by differences in interpretation. As a result, even as evidence mounts that climate change could result in a near-unliveable 'hothouse earth', raising the spectre of an existential dilemma , action on climate change proceeds at a glacial pace, seemingly embedded in endless and protracted debate.

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The Electricity-Groundwater Conundrum: Case for a Political Solution to a Political Problem

... I am grateful to Regina Birner, Shantanu Dixit, Stephen Howes, Avinash Kishore and Tushaar Sh... more

Handbook of Climate Change and India: Development, Politics, and Governance

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Copenhagen: climate of mistrust

Economic and Political Weekly, 2009

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Tubewell capitalism: groundwater development and agrarian change in Gujarat

This is a detailed and timely study of the development of groundwater use and the implications of... more

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