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This chapter positions the climate change policy of India as having been driven by international compulsions. Right up to the 1990s, it was not a domestic priority. It suited us to relegate climate change to the position of a developed country problem. India held that climate change had been caused by the developed world and should be solved by them. This position fitted into our perception of equity as a significant cornerstone of India’s development policy, both domestically and internationally. This chapter reviews how changes in this stance took place more to fit into the changing international scenario and by the need to be perceived as a forward-looking nation. The participation in Clean Development Mechanism in 2005, the drawing up of the National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2008 and the acceptance in Cancun in 2010 that ‘all countries must take binding commitments, under appropriate legal forms’ constituted significant turning points. Policymakers need to continue to engage simultaneously with the domestic and international constituencies and chart a path of growth which reconciles the two contradicting perceptions. India is gradually moving in that direction with focus on reducing energy intensity, on renewable energy and on low-carbon growth.

This chapter examines how environmental issues of the future can be addressed learning from the evolution of environmental policy in the last three decades. After briefly reviewing the earlier chapters, we also provide an overview of the changed understandings of policy formulation in the literature. In particular, we examine the analysis of the interaction between economic systems and ecosystems as also the effect of interactions between multiple institutions, new and old. It is to be noted that the presence of several categories of stakeholders with unequal access to information and wealth further complicates matters. The inescapable understanding that we get from the analysis of social-ecological systems is that there is no one panacea that a policymaker, located in a remote echelon, can dispense. Panaceas often lead to significant problems. The way ahead is in adaptive learning with different kinds of change being factored in.

Land and forest resources have been at the centre of several policy interventions in India over a long period of time: policy declarations, acts and rules as well as incentivising and restraining tax and subsidy structures. Field reality observed by social scientists and their natural science counterparts has also been documented extensively in the last three to four decades. The questions we ask in this chapter are: Has the policy direction been impacted by the understandings from this literature? What is the empirical learning policy link? Who are the stakeholders who count?

Can the absence of good policy be attributed to the absence of a good theoretical understanding? Or is it that we need to understand the impact of knowledge at different levels, initially on policy as drafted in an overarching manner, and then on the drawing up of rules and laws which govern actual affects at the project and grassroots levels? This chapter examines these issues. It looks at different theoretical understandings of the environment and evaluates their effect, if any, on environmental policy, as well as on the details of laws and rules which give form to that policy. It first distinguishes between theory, models and frameworks. Postulating then that, at times, overarching concepts capture public attention more than detailed frameworks, the chapter then evaluates the policy impact of concepts such as sustainable development, resilience and vulnerability. It also examines the possibility of radical approaches such as de-growth and radical ecological democracy impacting policy. Recent developments in India such as the formulation of the National Environmental Policy, the Forest Rights Act and the move towards low-carbon growth and green accounting are seen as positive developments. On the whole, however, the Indian agenda on environment stands at the crossroads. Two kinds of processes are operating, albeit at different rates. There does exist a gradual understanding in different sections of the impending environmental crises. Other elements in the system, moving at a much faster pace, demand faster growth in the shorter run. These are driven by unconstrained market forces, irresponsible industrialisation and urbanisation. We do not know which way the balance will tilt.

Environmental movements replace deliberation and adjudication by the language of rights, livelihoods or value systems. They usually bring together like-minded stakeholders on issues of common interest. Drawing from the documentation for India, this chapter addresses the following issues: What role can such environmental movements play in the formulation of policy and through what channels? Further, what role have they played in the last three decades in India? Significant environmental movements are analysed from the viewpoint of the impact they have had. Further, impact is defined in three ways, each of which has the potential of initiating an iterative process that influences decision-making in the future. An immediate impact could be in terms of an act passed by the parliament or an executive order influencing the project at hand. Alternatively, impact may be on sectoral policy or the manner in which future projects are evaluated or granted approval. Finally, a change in the macro policy environment could occur which results in a mainstreaming of environmental issues.

This chapter examines the interlinkages between economic systems and ecosystems. It maintains that the functioning of economic systems has not reflected adequately the role of nature’s categories, ecosystems. While both natural and socio-economic systems can be viewed as complex adaptive systems, there is an urgent need to manage better the disparate movement between them. Two approaches are postulated for doing this. In the first, independently generated scientific knowledge is used in the framework of risk analysis and management to set limits on the domain of economic systems. In the second, economic decision-making is strengthened by attempting to put a value on hitherto unvalued ecosystem services provided to humans. We argue that the two approaches can be used in different contexts and also complement each other in some. However, underlying both is an ethical concern with services and well-being in the future, both of the human and non-human species. Whichever approach we adopt, a stable co-evolution between economic and ecosystems will take place only when such a concern is reached in the form of accepted social norms reflected in policy.

This chapter first examines aspects of the linkages between nature, economy society reiterating the urgent need for dealing with the complexity of nature and society interactions from diverse disciplinary perspectives: It further postulates that whichever discipline we begin from, it is the ethical undertones that drive the analysis in directions which acquire meaning in terms of the quality and legitimacy of decision-making. Methodologies acquire meaning only when interfaced with or interpreted in the context of value systems. The emerging literature on valuation of ecosystems and ecosystem services is examined, both as a methodology and as a tool for providing policy direction.

(2006). Quick Fixes for the Environment: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem? Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 48, No. 10, pp. 20-27.

Forest ecosystems provide a range of products and services for human use, primarily due to the biodiversity inherent in them. From the ecological viewpoint, this diversity is of different kinds and has the potential to cater to human well-being in multifarious ways. However, the mix of services that is available to any economy from forests depends, in addition to their biological characteristics, on the nature of the economic regime within which they are exploited. Some commodities such as timber are extracted in a regime driven, in the main, by market forces. Others such as non-timber forest products may be extracted under a variety of arrangements, the range varying from open access to common property regimes. Services such as those of water cycle augmentation and micro-climate regulation are typically available to communities as free goods. It is hypothesized that this difference in institutional regimes has implications for the mix of products and services that are extracted in different ways. • Through its effect on the extraction efforts for the marketed product. • Because of policies, such as plantation, which are intended to increase the supply of the marketed product, typically, timber. • Through a change in biodiversity of the forest stock which in turn results in a decreased availability of the non-marketed products. The present paper studies conditions under which timber has been extracted from forests of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) during the 1975–2000 period to examine this proposition. It is postulated that extraction of timber at any point of time depends on the stock, the effort involved in extraction (as represented by the per unit cost of extraction), the biodiversity index (defined as a product biodiversity index) and a variable depicting ecological characteristics of the forests. Using a modified Gordon–Schaefer production function, and the assumption that forests are managed for “sustainable timber extraction”, the reduced form equations are derived and estimated using data from Uttar Pradesh forests for the 1975–2000 period. The results suggest that, in the absence of variables representing the plantation area and biodiversity-corrected stocks, the explanatory power of the model is low, even though extraction is seen to be significantly impacted by effort. If, however, the ratio of plantation area and biodiversity-adjusted extraction are introduced as explanatory variables, interesting results with respect to the trend of extraction over time are obtained. As stocks of woody biomass increase, extraction increases. A decrease in biodiversity of the stock may be accompanied, under a certain set of circumstances, with a rising trend in extraction, and at a rising rate as explained above. However, an increased biodiversity may imply a decreasing trend in the extraction in the future provided that present extraction Y does not rise at a rate faster than the rate of increase in the biodiversity. These two results seen together are, we believe, significant. They point to the fact that policies aimed at increasing plantation increase short-run timber extraction. Further, if biodiversity increases, the impact on future extraction of timber depends on relative rates of change in biodiversity and extraction per unit effort. It is clear that trade-offs between timber extraction and existence of biodiverse forests providing a variety of goods and services.

Modeling the factors determining ecological and economic value gives rise to conceptual and methodological problems. Economic valuation typically focuses on use value in the short run, whether within or outside the market. Ecologists, however, are more concerned with ecological values, which provide an underlying long-run notion of value interpreted in a more general sense. This paper investigates the nature of the link between these two aspects of value in the context of a wetland in Northern India, which is also designated as a Ramsar site and a national park. A dynamic simulation model in a ‘STELLA’ environment is set up to understand the linkages between underlying ecological relationships and economic value emerging from them. The simulations point towards a critical dependence of economic value (direct and indirect income derived from the park) on ecological health indices. A non-linearity is to be seen in the impact of an increase in ecological health indices on tourist traffic. This responsive or elasticity with respect to ecological health is more at higher values of the indices, indicating thereby that once efforts at conservation increase the attractiveness of the park above a certain level, the impact may be cumulative and returns in terms of income may rise more than proportionately.

This study examines, in a developing-country context, the nature of the linkages between deforestation, land degradation and the movement of population from one region to another. While it is usually hypothesized that environmental degradation leads to stress migration from rural areas, changes in institutional arrangements and the subsequent regeneration of land and water may change the situation, decreasing the attractiveness of the option to migrate. Primary data from six villages in Rajasthan (a region in Western India) are used to set up alternative models using OLS, logit and 3SLS systems methods to test alternative forms of the hypotheses. It is found that the proper specification of group property rights, as a consequence of the existence of non-governmental organizations, does reduce migration. Further, a household's decisions to migrate and/or to participate in common property right creation are interrelated, being parts of its labour force allocation decisions. Other variables influencing household decisions to participate are levels of asset ownership, degree of dependence on common land and level of education.

This study examines the linkages between environmental degradation (viewed primarily as deforestation and land degradation) and the movement of population from one region to another within a developing country. The hypothesis postulated is that the link between population and environmental degradation is mediated by the nature of property rights in land. This hypothesis is examined with the help of two alternative methodologies. Firstly, a simultaneous equations model using data for the arid and semi-arid region of Western India illustrates that outmigration from the region is largely the consequence of push factors such as environmental degradation and decrease in common land. Alternatively, micro experiments in environmental protection and the creation of common property rights on open access land in the same region indicate that the association between migrational change, creation of common property rights and participation indices is high. It can be concluded that once property rights are well defined with the help of appropriate institutional arrangements, labour moves towards the creation of common assets and an improvement in the environment takes place. Out migration is prevented and higher levels of population are supported by the same resources.

Alteration of forested land to other uses incurs costs to a nation’s economy that are frequently not calculated in estimates of national productivity. Alternative methods of value are discussed and employed to evaluate the non-timber products of India’s tropical deciduous forests. Many undervalued resources found in these forests are described, and monetary value ascribed to them, to demonstrate the importance of the resources to the Indian economy.

The problems of achieving sustainable development are explored in the context of Indian agriculture. The Green Revolution led to rising living standards, but unanticipated externalities caused a degradation of land resources. For non-green revolution areas, alternative sources of unsustainable development are identified. The inadequacy of standard analytical approaches to the issues of growth is considered, and the conclusion drawn that both ecological and social-political systems must evolve together to create an environment in which policies can successfully increase current living standards whilst protecting future production possibilities.

While some argue that trade liberalization has raised incomes and led to environmental protection in developing countries, others claim that it generates neither poverty reduction nor sustainability. The detailed case studies in this book demonstrate that neither interpretation is universally correct, given how much depends on specific policies and institutions that determine ‘on-the-ground’ outcomes. Drawing on research from six countries around the developing world, the book also presents the unique perspectives of researchers at both the world’s largest development organization (The World Bank) and the world’s largest conservation organization (World Wildlife Fund) on the debate over trade liberalization and its effects on poverty and the environment.

The irreversible loss of genetic information (and the resulting loss of both evolutionary and technological options) caused by the extinction of species involves a global public good, the gene pool. Although important, it is not the only reason to be concerned about biodiversity change. As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005b) points out, another reason for concern is the role of biodiversity in the loss of ecosystem services. These also involve public goods, but unlike the public good associated with species extinction, they are almost always local or regional in extent. The conservation of species threatened with local extirpation protects a number of provisioning and cultural services, as well as the capacity of the local system to function over a range of environmental and market conditions. The latter may involve, for example, the regulation of specific biogeochemical cycles in different climatic conditions, or the protection of crop yields in the face of an array of pests and pathogens. In almost all cases, however, conservation of the functionality of particular ecosystems provides benefits to specific communities rather than to global society (Perrings and Gadgil 2003). Whether we focus on the gene pool or ecosystem services, however, biodiversity – the composition and relative abundance of species – is important because of its role in supporting the capacity of the system to deliver services over a range of environmental conditions. The economic problem of biodiversity, in this sense, differs from the economic problem of individual biological resources. The question is not at what rate to extract a particular resource, but how to balance the mix of species to assure a flow of benefits over a range of possible conditions. Biodiversity conservation is frequently a public good. In many cases, nobody can be excluded from the benefits offered by the protection of assemblages, and if one person benefits it does not reduce the benefits to others. Because it is a public good, it will be ‘undersupplied’ if left to the market. The incentive that people have to free ride on the conservation activities of others means that people will collectively conserve too little biodiversity. At the same time the lack of markets for many of the biodiversity impacts of human activities mean that people are not confronted with the true cost of their decisions. Open access to scarce environmental resources is widely recognized to be a major cause of overexploitation. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the world’s fisheries. Worm et al. (2006) identified catches from 1950 to 2003 within all 64 large marine ecosystems worldwide: the source of 83 per cent of global catches over the past 50 years. They reported that the rate of fisheries collapses in these areas (catches less than 10 per cent of the recorded maximum) has been accelerating, and that 29 per cent of fished species were in a state of collapse in 2003. Cumulative collapses affected 65 per cent of all species fished. While property rights are generally better developed in terrestrial systems, many of the effects from anthropogenic land use change on biodiversity and

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005b) has fundamentally changed the way in which scientists are thinking about the value of ecosystems. By harnessing recent results on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning to an assessment of the valued services that people obtain from the natural environment, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has brought the analysis of ecosystems into the domain of economics. Ecosystem services are defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. Since the value of any asset is simply the discounted stream of benefits that are obtained from that asset, the benefit streams associated with ecosystem services may be used to estimate the value of the underlying ecological assets. Those assets are not the traditional stocks of resource economics – minerals, water, timber, and so on – but the systems that yield flows of such things. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005b) distinguishes four broad benefit streams: provisioning services, cultural services, supporting services, and regulating services. The first of these is the most familiar. Provisioning services cover the renewable resources that have been the focus of much work in environmental and resource economics, including foods, fibres, fuels, water, biochemicals, medicines, pharmaceuticals, and genetic material. Many of these products are directly consumed, and are subject to reasonably well-defined property rights. They are priced in the market, and even though there may be important externalities in their production or consumption, those prices bear some relation to the scarcity of resources. The second category, cultural services, is similarly quite familiar. These services include a range of largely non-consumptive uses of the environment, and reflect the fact that the diversity of ecosystems is mirrored in the diversity of human cultures. Cultural services include the spiritual, religious, aesthetic, and inspirational wellbeing that people derive from the ‘natural’ world around them. They include the sense of place that people have, as well as the totemic importance of particular landscapes and species. More importantly, they include (traditional and scientific) information, awareness, and understanding of ecosystems and their individual components offered by functioning ecosystems. Some cultural services, such as ecotourism, are offered through well-developed markets. Others are not. Many cultural services are still regulated by custom and usage, or by traditional taboos, rights, and obligations. Nevertheless, they are directly used by people, and so are amenable to valuation by methods designed to reveal people’s preferences. The category of support services captures the main ecosystem processes that underpin all other services. Examples offered by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment include soil formation, photosynthesis, primary production, and nutrient, carbon, and water cycling. These services play out at quite different spatial and temporal scales. For example, nutrient cycling involves the maintenance of the roughly twenty nutrients essential for life, in different concentrations in different parts of the system. It is often localized, and is therefore at least

Participation is the initiation and continuance of an active process by which beneficiary groups influence the direction and execution of development activity. In the context of resource management participatory institutions often present an alternative when the market and/or the state fail to maintain resource stocks at desirable levels. This paper presents two case-studies of the emergence of participatory institutions and builds up analytical models that explain the process of their evolution in an inter-temporal framework. It is shown that the evolution, sustenance and replication of participation and its impact on levels of resource conservation depends on (a) the nature of the links between common and private property resources, (b) the possibility of taking advantage of scale economies, and finally (c) the distributional rules and arrangements.

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by internation competition and recalcitrance.

In aCommentary in Nature last month, Douglas J. McCauley argued that with little evidence to show that market-based conservation works, the time was ripe for a return to the protection of nature for nature's sake. Predictably this has provoked comment, and in Correspondence this week, the issues are aired.

This paper aims to evaluate social forestry projects with explicit distribution, management and design considerations built into the analysis. This approach eliminates the need for giving weights to parts of the output accruing to different sections of society. Attention is focused on the evolution of institutions that ensure that project output/input shall accrue to different social groups. For the specific project analysed, rates of return to the project authority and to society are calculated. It is found that a divergence of interests between the two may exist. This can be minimized by correct selection of design and a system of cost sharing based on people's participation.

While some argue that trade liberalization has raised incomes and led to environmental protection in developing countries, others claim that it generates neither poverty reduction nor sustainability. The detailed case studies in this book demonstrate that neither interpretation is universally correct, given how much depends on specific policies and institutions that determine ‘on-the-ground’ outcomes. Drawing on research from six countries around the developing world, the book also presents the unique perspectives of researchers at both the world’s largest development organization (The World Bank) and the world’s largest conservation organization (World Wildlife Fund) on the debate over trade liberalization and its effects on poverty and the environment.