ABSTRACT
Establishing the environmental rule of law has been identified as a precondition to achieving sustainable development. Increasingly however norms around environmental sustainability are being eroded by rising neoliberalism. Within countries, especially developing countries these trends are creating tensions for environmental policy-making that often require adjudication/judicial intervention. In this paper, we use the case of the National Green Tribunal (NGT), situated in a rising economy - India to understand how it operates amidst these tensions, restricting our analysis to pre-COVID-19 to minimise confounding effects of the pandemic. We find that the limited jurisdiction allows the NGT to continue to uphold the principles of environmental sustainability. The NGT is able to serve as an indicator of the kinds of environmental issues cropping up, deliver environmental justice and improve governance. However, there are visible tensions driven by the larger political economy of environmental policymaking in India that pose a significant systemic challenge to the effectiveness of the NGT. Given the resurgence of economic imperatives in post-pandemic policymaking, the NGT and other similar environmental courts/tribunals across the globe, need to draw on sources of strength established pre-pandemic to uphold environmental rule of law going forward.
Subject(s)
City Planning/trends , Communication , Contact Tracing , Coronavirus Infections/epidemiology , Disaster Planning/trends , Leadership , Pneumonia, Viral/epidemiology , Sustainable Development/trends , COVID-19 , Cities/statistics & numerical data , Food Supply/economics , Food Supply/statistics & numerical data , Global Warming/prevention & control , Humans , Information Dissemination , Internationality , Internet , Mobile Applications , Pandemics , Transients and MigrantsABSTRACT
Seasonal migration to cities is a common livelihood strategy for forest-fringe households in central India. Based on a previously collected household survey of 5000 villages across 500 forest-fringe villages in 32 dis-tricts of central India, we identify migration patterns over the last 5 years. Villages with seasonal workers are widely dispersed (75% of surveyed villages) and 81% of destination cities had reported COVID-19 cas-es at the beginning of the lockdown. Using a disease spread model to assess distancing strategies if return-ing migrants carry the virus to villages, we find that lenient restrictions for people within a village com-bined with maximal restrictions between villages could reduce the number of people exposed compared with moderate restrictions both within and between villages. Such a 'village bubble' strategy could reduce the risk of spread among vulnerable populations and requires that essential goods reach villages.