Articles by Navroz K Dubash

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.

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 proposes a "multi-criteria decision analysis" approach to this problem, using illustrative examples from the cooking and buildings sectors. An MCDA approach enables policy processes that are analytically rigorous, participative and transparent, which are required to address India's complex energy and climate challenges.

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 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 domestic national approach of actively exploring "co-benefits" - policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains - suggests that it does take climate science seriously and has embraced responsibility as duty. However, by focusing on articulating rigid principles rather than building on actual policies and actions, it only weakens its own position.

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 a discussion of the key negotiation issues that took centre stage. It then provides a political interpretation of the Copenhagen Accord and its future prospects. The reflections locate the process in the context of the larger, and unresolved tensions between the North and the South. The article concludes with an outline of what the Copenhagen experience suggests is needed in the Indian climate debate.