The environmental trade-offs

how the country deals with its poor.

Many of us who have written on environmental regulatory regimes in India have failed (I am happy to offer myself as a good example) to read the tea leaves. I feel a large part of this failure lies in our inability to look at one of these quintuple forces — the way the economic world deals with natural resources and environment while it builds a logic for fuelling the engines of economic growth. How does the language deployed by economic forces legitimise the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources even as it claims to have valued it high enough (or at least better than it was a decade ago)?

This book sets you thinking about it. If you haven’t so far, it’s a good place to start. A set of eight essays by different authors looks at the deployment of the language of economics from the regional to the global to price natural resources and the environment, and examines whether that language has really helped. Or whether it has helped some interests to continue appropriating natural resources along long-standing trend-lines.

The essays are of varied quality, perhaps because the editors have brought together varied kind of authors, from academics to activists. For me, the first three essays (including the introduction) do it best. Jeremy Walker, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, unravels how and where the language about market-based conservation policies originates and how it plays out. It is a fascinating read, considering the idea has deepened in India over the past decade, without a good assessment of how it has worked.

Shalini Bhutani, an independent policy analyst, contends with how intellectual property regimes interact with legal instruments meant to protect biodiversity and how the latter ends up being a tool of the former.

All the countries have under the Paris Agreement agreed that nations need to be paid to conserve or regrow their forests (known as REDD+ or REDD in climate change jargon) because these forests sequester carbon dioxide which would otherwise accumulate in the atmosphere and make global temperatures worse. Simone Lovera of the international NGO Global Forest Coalition looks at the consequences of this move.

Another piece that holds attention is by Shripad Dharmadhikary, who writes about how the state values natural water sources in order to exploit them.

Some essays fall short of a cohesive perspective but they still provide insights that are heard little in academic spaces, particularly within economic policy-making. Soumitra Ghosh’s essay (he has worked long with communities on forestry issues in West Bengal) is one such. He provides a good view into the historical process of how forests were treated as assets and signals the creeping new economic language (and the government policies that come welded along). But the focus is too much on the past than on details of the current and future economic narratives.

What is missing though is an essay linking the production of energy and material goods with natural resources, in India or globally, and the challenges for any state in finding the equilibrium at different stages of the economy. It would have been a good addition to this book.

As a whole the book suggests the solution is not to “commodify” nature. But, the trouble is, someone or the other is always commodifying it on different scales or levels. Nature is an economic resource and there is no running away from it. Economic systems will try to exploit it and at all times there will be contestations over how that can be done best, with equity and justice at heart. Even saving the tiger and the forests for them means imposing a value on the animal or the forest at the cost of excluding others from competing from it — such as a miner or a tribal, or both.

The book whets the appetite, but it is not an entirely satisfying read. Still, books that leave questions lingering in one’s head are no less valuable. Routine economic commentary for the public at large in India mostly refuses to even ask these questions. This commentary does occasionally acknowledge the challenge India faces in keeping its natural resources intact and its air and water clean. The politically correct writers of economic commentary refuse to grapple with the dirty realities and granular details that must inform how a nation makes the trade-offs between environment and growth. And sorry, there is no win-win here. This book hints well at why that is so. Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon (Eds) Sage 244 pages; ~845