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Understanding India's Representation of North–South Climate Politics

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Understanding India's Representation of North–South Climate Politics Understanding India’s Representation of North–South Climate Politics Shangrila Joshi Understanding India’s Representation of North–South Climate Politics • Shangrila Joshi* International negotiations to mitigate climate change in the so-called post- Kyoto era have been caught in a North–South impasse.1 One key issue has been the refusal of the US to accept mandatory caps on greenhouse gas (GHG) emis- sions until emerging emitters such as India and China do so as well. The Fif- teenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) to the United Nations Framework Con- vention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen was an important milestone in climate negotiations. These three countries came together at that meeting to draft a compromise agreement—albeit a weak one—and made vol- untary commitments to reducing greenhouse gas intensity based on 2005 emis- sion levels. Yet legally binding mandatory caps on emissions for these countries remain contentious. This paper engages with contentious debates over mitiga- tion responsibility within the UNFCCC, by focusing on India’s position in these debates. India is increasingly becoming one of the key players in climate negoti- ations due to its growing economy, rising emissions proªle, and clout in Third World politics and North–South bargaining.2 I base my analysis on twenty-two qualitative interviews conducted in Delhi during a six-week period between November 2008 and January 2009, par- ticipant observation during COP-15 in December 2009, and review of govern- ment and NGO documents, editorials, and public statements. I used the snow- ball sampling method for selecting interviewees, including ofªcials from the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF), as well as two inºuential NGOs in Indian climate discourse and policy, the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and the Center for Science and Environment (CSE). These interviewees included delegates to UNFCCC negotiations and members of the Prime Minis- ter’s Council on Climate Change (PMCCC). The aim was to understand how the Indian intelligentsia thinks about * The author would like to thank Shaul Cohen, Alexander Murphy, James Pletcher, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts, and Aarti Gupta for copyediting the ªnal draft. 1. Roberts and Parks 2007. 2. Atteridge 2010; Jakobsen 1998; Rajan 1997; Vihma 2011. Global Environmental Politics 13:2, May 2013, doi:10.1162/GLEP_a_00170 © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 128 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00170 by guest on 26 September 2021 Shangrila Joshi • 129 international climate negotiations and deliberations. Interviewees shared their perceptions of the Indian government’s stance on climate negotiations. Their collective responses revealed a strong inºuence of North–South imaginaries in shaping their agreement with the government’s position. This is important in- sofar as the relevance of the North–South binary in global climate politics has been questioned by some critical scholars3 even as others continue to engage with it.4 In the following section, I brieºy describe debates over the North–South framing of global inequality, particularly in the context of global environmental politics. The North–South Question The term Global South is synonymous with categories such as developing coun- tries or the Third World.5 The North–South terminology gained prominence in the context of proposals for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) dur- ing the early 1970s.6 Scholars have problematized the North–South framing of global inequality for several reasons. These include heterogeneities within each category, as well as decreasing gaps between North and South,7 the state- centrism and “Third Worldism” inherent in a North–South framing of global inequality,8 preference for class-based analyses of global inequality,9 and the perceived decline in the legitimacy of the Third World coalition in global poli- tics after the end of the Cold War.10 Toal has argued that “a critical geopolitics is one that refuses the spatial topography of First World and Third World, North and South, state and state.”11 Despite its critics, the North–South geopolitical imagination continues to be regarded as a useful construct, particularly in the domain of environ- ment and development.12 Proponents argue that a North–South framing is a re- minder of the linkages between geopolitics and development,13 and of abiding core–periphery dynamics and imperialism reminiscent of past colonial rela- tionships.14 Contemporary scholars continue to refer to global inequities along 3. E.g., Barnett 2007; Sowers 2007. 4. Najam 2004; Roberts and Parks 2007. 5. Jones 1983; Williams 2005. 6. Bhagwati 1977; Cox 1979; Doty 1996; Jha 1982. 7. Eckl and Weber 2007; McFarlane 2006; Payne 2004; Slater 1997; Therein 1999; Toal 1994. 8. Berger 2004; Dodds 2001; Simon and Dodds 1998; Toal 1994. 9. Barnett 2007; Conca 2001; Newell 2005. 10. Berger 2004; Slater 1997; Therien 1999; Williams 2005. 11. Toal 1994, 231. 12. Simon and Dodds 1998; Slater 1997. 13. Simon and Dodds 1998. 14. Potter 2001; Power 2006; Slater 2004; Slater 2006. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00170 by guest on 26 September 2021 130 • Understanding India’s Representation of North–South Climate Politics a North–South divide.15 Many do so implicitly even as they criticize these bina- ries,16 a phenomenon termed the “paradox of categories.”17 I suggest that the Global South and North need to be understood as ºuid and dynamic categories, rather than being static and ªxed. In light of the hetero- geneity of the South, some scholars ªnd it useful to see the Third World not as a monolith that represents a structurally determined political solidarity, but rather as a political entity that ºuctuates between acting in unity and maintain- ing plurality according to the geopolitical context.18 In the context of the ongo- ing dominance of industrialized states in the global political economy,19 the Southern construction allows countries with lesser inºuence to wield increased inºuence in global negotiations.20 Other scholars refer to these categories as imaginaries. They refer to the Global South as an “imagined community of the powerless and vulnera- ble,”21 in most cases victimized by a colonial and imperial past.22 Despite claims of South-North graduation, scholars caution that such graduation is of- ten partial—usually economic23—and that self-identiªcation with the South arises from “a sense of shared vulnerability and a shared distrust of the pre- vailing world order rather than a common ordeal of poverty.”24 That such self- identiªcation is little more than ideological posturing by Third World elites is a claim that has yet to be veriªed.25 It is helpful to think of categories not as static “pre-given things-in-the- world” but rather as complex and dynamic entities that political actors continu- ally renegotiate, rearticulate and reproduce amidst power struggles.26 The Global South is one such category, as evident in climate politics. Individuals engaged in policy negotiations and discourses substantiate or deny the North–South binary among countries. Placing such agency on individuals helps us see these catego- ries not as givens, but rather as socially constructed and hence continually rene- gotiated and reproduced. Since the process of categorization is so inherently po- litical,27 it is important to examine how and why these categories are contested by some and defended by others. Yet little if any research exists that examines the role of individuals in reproducing such imaginaries.28 Past research has pro- 15. E.g., Athanasiou 2010; Kapoor 2008; Najam 2004; O’Brien and Leichenko 2003; Potter 2006; Slater 2006. 16. Williams 2005. 17. Jones 2009, 176. 18. Broad and Landi 1996; Williams 2005. 19. Obrien and Leichenko 2003; Therien 1999. 20. Hansen 1980; Williams 2005. 21. Williams 2005, 53. 22. Anand 2004. 23. Hansen 1980. 24. Najam 2004, 128. 25. Roberts and Parks 2007; Williams 2005. 26. Jones 2009, 180. 27. Ibid. 28. Dodds 2001; Williams 2005. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00170 by guest on 26 September 2021 Shangrila Joshi • 131 vided insight into the reproduction of the Third World through the institution- alization of norms in climate negotiations.29 I go beyond this here by also exam- ining how and why the Indian intelligentsia reproduces these binary identities in the context of climate politics. North–South Environmental Politics The increasing salience of global environmental concerns, and the role of some developing countries in alleviating them, has signiªcantly altered North–South diplomacy, with the South reportedly gaining bargaining power in global envi- ronmental politics.30 While some scholars have argued for the continued rele- vance of the Third World category for global environmental politics from a structuralist perspective,31 of greater relevance for this paper is the discursive construction of the North–South divide. The latter is a key feature of contempo- rary global environmental negotiations, which in turn has created the space necessary for the reproduction of these spatial imaginaries.32 In global environmental politics, the Group of 77 (G77) plus China is a negotiating entity representing a common developing country position, al- though occasionally individual countries or subgroups do diverge from this common position.33 The G77 plus China represents, for some, a “new regional- ism” that
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