Abstract
This paper seeks to examine India’s role in the politics of a specific climate change mitigation policy called “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+)”. It explores India’s strategic behaviour towards the development of REDD policy. The paper argues that India had pushed for the remodelling of the global REDD negotiations by expanding its scope to conservation activities, which entails more direct benefits for India. This is largely due to differences in India’s rates of forest cover and deforestation as compared to high forest - high deforestation countries such as Brazil and Indonesia. To substantiate its argument, the paper uses the main underpinnings of relative gains theory in international relations and applies them toward interpreting India’s behaviour in negotiating REDD+ at global level. Further, the paper analyses the Indian strategies used to remodel the REDD mechanism using insights from soft power theory and its more recent amendments. Thematic analysis of the REDD-relevant documents as well as exploratory expert interviews have been employed for showing India’s proactive role in the politics of REDD+. It is concluded that India indeed played a central role in critical past decisions, which lead to re-shaping REDD due to relative gains concerns and mainly by means of soft power strategies.
Highlights
Climate change has strongly dominated international forest and related environmental governance since the past 30 years (Singer and Giessen, 2017; Sahide et al, 2015; Giessen, 2013; Giessen et al, 2014)
India has prepared many documents for directly communicating with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through structured meetings of Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA)3, our analysis focused on reports which were directly relating to REDD policy or documents that substantially reflect and disseminate India’s stance on the REDD issue
Official documents generated by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) on issues related to the forest’s role in climate change mitigation clearly reflect India’s support for financial incentives such as REDD and the clean development mechanism (Gundimeda, 2004)
Summary
Climate change has strongly dominated international forest and related environmental governance since the past 30 years (Singer and Giessen, 2017; Sahide et al, 2015; Giessen, 2013; Giessen et al, 2014). India’s per capita GHG emissions are among the lowest in the world when accounted in total tonnes, India stands tall at being the fourth largest GHG emitter globally (Olivier et al, 2017) Given this dichotomy, India has very proactively positioned itself around the climate change discourse (Atteridge et al, 2012). Within global climate governance and among all other negotiations, a forest-specific mechanism has been negotiated as a central component of a post-Kyoto climate agreement (Lövbrand, 2009; Humphreys, 2006; 2008; Nijnik and Bizikova, 2008).
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