Locating climate controversies: Mapping climate change policy network in India during 2007-2010

In today’s world, humankind is facing the toughest challenge of climate change. Over the years, international protocols, from Kyoto to Cancun, failed to attain the desired consensus on climate change governance. Moreover, a strong debate is gradually surfacing on the pattern of future climate governance models between developed (Global North) and developing countries (Global South). Under growing international pressure in the recent past, India has taken some important steps towards climate change governance to address domestic level problem particularly during 2007-2010.

With this backdrop, the study investigates how is social network structure (composition of actors, power relations within the network) associated with policy positions related to India’s climate change during 2007-2010? Moreover, the study examines the degree of differences in the structure and content of national policy and networks output related to policy outcomes with particular reference to National Action Plan on Climate Change.

The theoretical perspective of the study follows environmental governance along with epistemic community approach and organizational state perspective in particular. The study is based on qualitative methodology and the main data collection methods were in-depth interviews of key informants, literature review of policy papers and content analysis of newspaper and web articles.

The study concludes that there are several long-term, unsolved governance issues which hinder the potentials of the national climate change action plan. The overall governance crisis involves inadequate participation of actors, top-down approach of policy making, disputes between different actors and stakeholders, and poor policy and law enforcement guidelines.