Institutionalizing Environmental Governance: Development, Democracy and Expertise

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to combine fieldwork with a systematic review of the published literature to define environmental governance ostensibly, identify its underlying normative principles, clarify exactly what the key-words, such as "democracy," and "sustainability" mean operationally, and lay down criteria to measure the success of developmental schemes that embrace the environmental governance model. It also seeks to analyze what it takes to re-tool state expert communities and institutionalize a new set of practices and procedures in state bureaucracies. Moreover, it seeks to discover what is entailed in scaling up technological and institutional design that have been successful in micro contexts to larger scales, or to transfer successful models across cultural contexts. Last, but by no means the least, it seeks to address the question of conflict resolution: how, in the process of engendering such paradigmatic change and institutionalize environmental governance are the inevitable political conflicts to be negotiated at various levels of state bureaucracies and technocracies? Research will focus on three sectors: forests and biodiversity, water, and renewable energy, in India, which offers a large number of case studies in the context of a vibrant democracy. Combining the insights of Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, the proposed program aims to be a landmark analysis of the environmental governance paradigm, provide a path breaking study of the role of expertise in the environment and development in the third world, and thereby add to the theoretical understanding of democracy and technology.