The challenge of multi level environmental governance in India

Abstract

India’s Constitution and the country’s political framework provide possibilities for multi-tiered environmental governance systems. However this possibility has not been sufficiently explored on account of decades of centralized governance of natural resources in the country, which in turn was largely prompted by the indifference of ‘development starved’ provincial governments towards environmental concerns. With the advent of global environmental agreements, the complexity of environmental governance has increased for India. The country’s national development goals have to be not only situated within the matrix of the country’s conservation goals, but also within the context of India’s commitments to global conventions dealing with global commons. Locally designed plans can solve the riddle, if structured well. This paper outlines the problem at hand, and proceeds to lay out a system of multi- tiered environmental governance for India that reconciles national development and conservation objectives with global environmental concerns.