Can green tribunals help to resist neo-liberalism in environmental governance – The case of India

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.