Navroz K. Dubash

Sustainable Futures Collaborative

Climate change, as noted by the recently released technical report of the “stocktake” under the United Nations negotiation process, is an “all of economy, all of society” problem. To induce change consistent with the scale and scope of this challenge, countries are increasingly creating “framework laws” on climate change. The Intergovernmental Pane...

Is the process of ramping up greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets as part of an “ambition cycle” working to address the global climate crisis? The first Global Stocktake (GST) of progress recently submitted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confirms that progress in reducing emissions is well behind what is...

The majority of the world's largest carbon emitters are either federations or have adopted systems of decentralised governance. The realisation of the world's climate mitigation objectives therefore depends in large part on whether and how governments within federal systems can cooperate to reduce carbon emissions and catalyse the emergence of low-...

Driven by falling renewable energy (RE) prices, rapid transformation in the energy technology landscape, and climate change considerations, India’s electricity sector is undergoing a transition. The contours, costs, and pace of this transition will be determined by the nature of policy responses; institutional preparedness; and recognition of the c...

The Working Group III (WG III) contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. The report reflects new findings in the relevant literature and builds on previous IPCC reports, including the WG III contribution t...

Institutions can affect coordination, consensus, and strategy.

Tools are needed to benchmark carbon emissions and pledges against criteria of equity and fairness. However, standard economic approaches, which use a transparent optimization framework, ignore equity. Models that do include equity benchmarks exist, but often use opaque methodologies. Here we propose a utilitarian benchmark computed in a transparen...

How do states respond to the challenge of climate governance? The Paris Agreement has led to heightened interest in domestic climate policies, but attention to underlying national climate institutional architectures has lagged behind. This literature gap deserves to be addressed, because climate change brings considerable governance challenges. Dra...

Growing political pressure to find solutions to climate change is leading to increasing calls for multiple disciplines, in particular those that are not traditionally part of climate change research, to contribute new knowledge systems that can offer deeper and broader insights to address the problem. Recognition of the complexity of climate change...

India’s centrality to global mitigation efforts makes it an important point of inquiry in studies of climate governance. However, we understand little of how climate change has been institutionalized in India’s decision-making processes. We capture the emergence and decline of climate institutions over three decades, showing how political condition...

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies f...

An energy supply approach is inadequate to India's energy requirements at a time when multiple objectives need to be addressed. The state of play in energy supply and demand is examined, and the recovery of an older tradition of attention to energy demand patterns in addition to energy supply is argued for. The gains from an explicit attention to t...

Over the last two decades, many countries have passed laws addressing climate change and related areas. Research now shows that these laws make a difference to emission outcomes, but the pathways of impact require further research.

New synthesis shows what a wasted decade means for the climate pact made in Paris. New synthesis shows what a wasted decade means for the climate pact made in Paris.

How is India engaging the climate change challenge? This introductory chapter explains the changing context for climate change debates in India, from one focused on diplomatic concerns of equity and responsibility for the problem to one equally concerned with understanding its development implications. The chapter lays out the rationale for why the...

This chapter sets the stage for a discussion on policies by reviewing the emergence of national policies and national institutions. This discussion starts with the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and its various ‘missions’. It discusses how Indian climate policy was frequently dictated by the pursuit of ‘co-benefits’ that bring both...

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 su...

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 prem...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policy-making has largely been conducted in isolation of development considerations. An emerging literature, bolstered by the “nationally determined” nature of the Paris Agreement, explores the identification and assessment of the co-impacts of mitigation actions. There is now a recognized need to consider mitigation...

The article Whose carbon is burnable? Equity considerations in the allocation of a “right to extract,” written by Sivan Kartha, Simon Caney, Navroz K. Dubash, and Greg Muttitt, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 24 May 2018.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement pose new conceptual challenges for energy decision makers by compelling them to consider the implications of their choices for development and climate mitigation objectives. This is a nontrivial exercise as it requires pragmatic consideration of the interconnections between energy systems an...

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 cons...

The introductory chapter lays out the rationale for the volume and provides a framework for analysing the political economy of Indian electricity. We first present a historically-rooted political economy analysis to understand the past and identify reforms for the future of electricity in India. We next outline an analytic framework to guide the em...

Carbon emissions—and hence fossil fuel combustion—must decline rapidly if warming is to be held below 1.5 or 2 °C. Yet fossil fuels are so deeply entrenched in the broader economy that a rapid transition poses the challenge of significant transitional disruption. Fossil fuels must be phased out even as access to energy services for basic needs and...

Global climate change governance has changed substantially in the last decade, with a shift in focus from negotiating globally agreed greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets to nationally determined contributions, as enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. This paper analyses trends in adoption of national climate legislation and strategies, GHG targ...

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emi...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conducts policy-relevant 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 enviro...

President Donald Trump's announcement that the United States will exit from the Paris Agreement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the agreement works. It also goes against long-agreed climate principles, and is blind to emergent clean energy trends. In practical terms, the US had activated a rollback of mitigation policies and contr...

This chapter examines the rise, design, and functioning of new infrastructure regulatory institutions in India, with particular attention to the process through which regulators are embedded in a local context. Regulatory performance is often benchmarked against an effort to insulate decision making from undue political influence by delegating powe...

India has a great deal at stake in the Paris Agreement. As a large and poor developing country, India stands to gain or lose from both obligations under the Agreement and its effectiveness in addressing climate change. This comment describes India as a premature power in climate politics, locates Indian climate negotiating positions in global conte...

A reply to “Paris Agreement: Differentiation without Historical Responsibility?” by Kirit S Parikh and Jyoti K Parikh (EPW, 9 April 2016), which deepens the discussion on the key concepts of co-benefits and historical responsibility.

Global energy transformation is being driven by climate change, but also by concerns of energy security, energy poverty and local environmental pollution. This diversity of objectives leads to a diversity of views on how energy transformation should occur. This chapter argues that the lack of global agreement on how to prioritize among alternative...

Prominent scholars and practitioners consider the role of global environmental politics in the face of increasing environmental stress. Humanity's collective impact on the Earth is vast. The rate and scale of human-driven environmental destruction is quickly outstripping our political and social capacities for managing it. We are in effect creating...

The growing focus on climate policy in India is not matched by an equivalent level of attention to institutions. Effective institutions are also needed for the design, coordination and implementation of policy. This paper examines the functioning of institutions, organised around three periods: pre-2007; 2007 to 2009 and 2010 to mid-2014. Several k...

This article 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 b...

Planning for India's energy future requires addressing multiple and simultaneous economic, social and environmental challenges. While there has been conceptual progress towards harnessing their synergies, there are limited methodologies available for operationalising a multiple objective framework for development and climate policy. This paper prop...

Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential...

What does India's Intended Nationally Determined Contribution imply for its approach to climate negotiations? And what implications does it have for domestic development choices? This article examines India's INDC through each lens, to understand the implied logic with regard to India's complex climate-development choices, and with regard to its st...

In 2009, the Government of India asked all Indian states and Union Territories to prepare State Action Plans on Climate Change, making it one of the largest efforts at sub-national climate planning globally. Through an examination of state climate plans in five Indian states, the paper explores the implications of sub-national climate measures by e...

What should India put forward as the mitigation component of its climate contribution (or ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contribution’ (INDC))? Since energy accounts for 77% of India’s greenhouse gas emissions, this question can only be answered as one part of a larger discussion about India’s energy future. This study conducts a comparative rev...

The language of transformational change is increasingly applied to climate policy, and particularly in climate finance. Transformational change in this context is used with respect to low-carbon development futures, with the emphasis on mitigation and GHG metrics. But, for many developing countries, climate policy is embedded in a larger context of...

This forum article outlines a research agenda focused on linkages between the UNFCCC and other governance arrangements that also address climate change. We take as our point of departure the recognition that the UNFCCC is no longer the sole site of global climate change governance, and thus the types of linkage across what we call the global climat...

Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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 su...

Co-benefits rarely enter quantitative decision-support frameworks, often because the methodologies for their integration are lacking or not known. This review fills in this gap by providing comprehensive methodological guidance on the quantification of co-impacts and their integration into climate-related decision making based on the literature. Th...

What is the appropriate balance between scientific analysis and governmental input in the IPCC? Claiming government overreach and calling for greater insulation of the process come from a misleadingly simple interpretation. Such insulation would likely diminish the policy relevance of the SPM. The

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 a...

The results are presented from a survey of national legislation and strategies to mitigate climate change covering almost all United Nations member states between 2007 and 2012. This data set is distinguished from the existing literature in its breadth of coverage, its focus on national policies (rather than international pledges), and on the use o...

There is a growing body of climate-related policy in India; at the same time, there is no clear and consistent approach or framework that directs and guides these efforts. In this paper, we propose and develop a methodology for operationalising a co-benefits approach to climate policy formulation. We use the technique of multi-criteria analysis, wh...

India occupies an intriguing dual position in global climate politics—a poor and developing economy with low levels of historical and per capita emissions, and a large and rapidly growing economy with rising emissions. Indian climate politics has substantially been shaped around the first perspective, and increasingly, under international pressure,...

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 c...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries' historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India's own domesti...

This article examines how India's domestic energy challenges have been shaped by global forces and how, in turn, India has engaged and is likely to engage in discussions of global energy governance. A central theme is that exploring India's engagement in global energy governance requires a clear understanding of its domestic energy context and how...

This special issue brings together leading experts from Asia, Europe and North America to examine the international institutions, national governance mechanisms and financing systems that together will determine the future of the energy sector. The enormous environmental externalities imposed by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the devastati...

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...

This paper, and the special issue it introduces, explores whether, and how, the rise of the regulatory state of the South, and its implications for processes of governance, are distinct from cases in the North. With the exception of a small but growing body of work on Latin America, most work on the regulatory state deals with the US or Europe, or...

Although not for the reason most climate watchers anticipated, the 15th Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fifth Meeting of the Parties (CMP-5) to the Kyoto Protocol at Copenhagen marked an important moment in the history of the climate negotiations. Despite considerable political pressure,...

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...

A report on a round table held in November 2009 on the proposed National Environmental Protection Agency.

Two weeks of wrangling and grandstanding at the United Nations climate change conference ended with the "Copenhagen Accord", which was a paper-thin cover-up of what was a near complete failure, though it does enable the process to move forward. These reflections on the climate negotiations first provide a brief encapsulation of events, followed by...

In recent years, global "deliberative processes" bringing together government, civil society, and private sector actors have become increasingly common on the global stage. Past work on these processes has either read them as relatively unproblematic consensus-building exercises, or exercises in global corporatism. Using a case study of the World C...

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 i...

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 ar...

Low cost and low quality electricity for agriculture contributes to erosion of electricity distribution Systems and encourages wasteful consumption, even as farmers are increasingly deprived of adequate and good quality power. While past efforts to solve this problem have focused on technocratic approaches, this paper attempts to articulate a polit...

In the compromise road map for future climate change negotiations that was drawn up at Bali, the urgency suggested by science was lost. There are yet positives in that the us remains in the negotiating process and the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" of the developing countries has been maintained. India needs to now ask it...

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 em...

Across the developing world, the notion of public utilities as social services is giving way new forms of economic organization around liberalized and commercialized sectors. Independent regulators are central to these new economic governance arrangements, which are intended to insulate utilities from government interference. By looking at the elec...

Indian debates over electricity have been strongly influenced by international experiences. This paper provides a critical overview of recent global debates on electricity restructuring. The paper first discusses the electricity price trajectories in countries that are often cited as models of reform. It then discusses several challenges to creatin...

The Indian electricity sector is poised at a critical moment. Implementation of the sweeping Electricity Act, 2003 is under way, even as there is considerable ferment in international thinking about electricity restructuring. This paper introduces a collection of papers written for EPW that review international experience with electricity restructu...

The laws and institutions governing electric power in Asia are in the midst of an uncertain transition. After decades of state control of electricity, in the 1990s Asian nations began transforming their power sectors to align with globally prevalent neoliberal trends. Following an initial burst of market-oriented reforms, electricity liberalization...