Environmental justice discourses in Indian climate politics

This paper examines India’s participation in ongoing climate politics with a lens of environmental justice (EJ). Using key-informant interviews conducted in Delhi and Copenhagen, I sought to understand how Indian officials conceptualized EJ in the context of climate change. I found my respondents to largely privilege ideas of historical responsibility and per capita equity in a North–South context. The North was seen to have an ecological debt towards the South and the South was seen to have a right to development and ecological space. I highlight two questions that inevitably arise from this framing of international environmental justice. What are the implications of this line of argument for the issue of domestic inequities within states? A related question is that if justice is seen as right to development, what exactly is meant by development? My findings indicate for the most part an uncritical acceptance of a neo-liberal vision of development based on an economic growth paradigm. Consequently, a direct link is observed between emissions and development, despite the impetus to delink them. There was also a marked reluctance among officials to discuss the topic of domestic inequities in India, and an inclination to dismiss them as a sovereignty issue. I suggest that an approach to EJ that combines the imperative of historical responsibility and ecological debt in an international context, with a ‘capabilities’ approach to EJ and development within the domestic context has potential to be more forceful and convincing than one that emphasizes the former but ignores the latter.