Since the 1970s, and especially following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, climate change has become an area of high politics, engaging the whole world at the international and diplomatic level. What matters, though, is how this translates into tangible policies at national and local levels, and how these different scales interact. Highlighting India's unique position in international climate negotiations, this article first scrutinises various official statements and documents of the Government of India (GOI) on climate change and puts them into an analytical framework that demonstrates continuities, but also significant recent shifts. Investigating the reasons for such modifying trends and examining their consequences, the article then suggests that partly owing to recent changes in global and (geo)political contexts, but also due to an Indian re-thinking of responsibility for addressing global climate change, there is a significant new development. This seems to augur a South Asian 'silent revolution' in green technologies, a prudent, economically and ecologically beneficial step, not only for India but possibly a sustainable global model.
Environmentalism as a global agenda has gained currency particularly in the aftermath of 1970s when some international events on environmental issues took place around the world. The diverse theoretical perspectives have been advanced to understand the rise of environmental agenda at global level and its consequential impact on sovereign states. It has increasingly been claimed by the scholars of neoliberal institutional theory that the environmental problems are such issues that can attract the attention of the whole world and generate cooperation among nation-states for its solution. But how far this assertion is true is the test of time. This article is a benign step in the direction of conducting this test. The neoliberal institutional theory, which is fully supportive of this claim, has been systematically analyzed in this article and its basic assumptions have been juxtaposed with the real-world situation arising out of environmental crisis to point out how state’s behavior/sovereignty gets modified to accommodate burden resulted from global environmental crisis. It has been observed in this article that in order to fully appraise the global environmental agenda, the basic assumptions of neoliberal institutional theory, which have by and large remained successful in explaining the global environmental agenda, need to be refined and strengthened further.
This paper explores Hindu religious concepts in their broadest form in general, and the philosophy and teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (a religious sect with its headquarters in Punjab, India) in particular, to access whether and in what ways the Indic spiritual value system is dovetailed with ecological ethics to make a case for climate action. Considering the influence of this sect in India and the size of its faith community, its role in propagating ecological ethics through the notion of karma, practice of vegetarianism, and service are examined here. The paper concludes that although the philosophical teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas like living a lighter life by practising vegetarianism and service do have great ecological values, the ethnographic account of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas shows that the devotees do not show any proclivity toward climate action due to the lack of direct teaching by their guru on the subject and therefore do not establish any relation between philosophical underpinnings of the sect and ecological stewardship. Nevertheless, the ecological sensibilities of this community are more aligned with their spiritual goal and are reflected in their behaviour.
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Book Reviews 121 exchange of art networks and literary imaginations. But the volume, claiming to be comprehensive, falls remarkably short regarding the inclusion of northeastern states of india within discourses of imagining a unified south Asian region. These states show close proximity, both culturally, ethnically and in terms of landscape to the south east Asian region, making them significant and complex anchors of analysis for imagining yet 'another' south Asia. Nonetheless, the volume explores multiple possible trajectories of the south Asian region and is attractive for researchers and scholars from many different disciplines. it would also be of value to civil society activists, think tanks and a wider general readership interested in understanding the region.
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