The normative structures of climate governance

Following several years of scientific attention to the threat of global warming, in the late 1980s a consensus emerged among many state and non-state actors around the idea that the global climate system is a common concern of humankind and requires protection for present and future generations.Footnote ¹¹ During the ensuing debate over the appropriate means through which the atmosphere should be governed to protect the climate system, two ideas established dominance as appropriate norms of governance. These norms concerned who should take responsibility for mitigating climate change, and how such mitigation should be pursued. The first governance norm stipulated that international efforts to reduce GHG emissions should be based on universal participation but guided by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (hereinafter referred to as CBDR).Footnote ¹² This differentiated interpretation of universal participation was central to early climate change negotiations and was institutionalised in Article 3 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, the representation of climate change as a global problem rendered the idea of universal participation susceptible to reinterpretation; indeed, within months of the UNFCCC entering into force in March 1994, the meaning of CBDR began to be challenged. Germany and the US, for example, advocated further differentiation among the developing countries to limit GHG emissions in the ‘more advanced developing countries’. Both countries justified this position on the grounds that stabilising GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at a ‘safe’ level would only be possible if future emissions in both the developed and developing countries were limited.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite persistent contestation from some states, the norm of CBDR was reinstitutionalised in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and again more recently in the Bali Action Plan and the Copenhagen Accord.Footnote ¹⁵

The normative structures of climate governance also define how mitigation should be pursued; in this context, the idea that mitigation should be pursued through domestic emission reduction targets attracted widespread legitimacy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Perhaps as a consequence of its institutionalisation in two existing international atmospheric agreements (the Montreal Protocol and the European Community's Large Combustion Plant Directive), this norm was reflected in numerous declarations and policies in the lead up to the creation of the UNFCCC in 1992.Footnote ¹⁶ An international conference convened by the Canadian Government in 1988, in Toronto, called for a reduction in global CO₂ emissions of twenty per cent by the year 2005. While this conference was not an official intergovernmental meeting, the expression of this target as an appropriate way of responding to the threat of climate change certainly bolstered the emerging norm of domestic emission reduction targets. Illustrative is the fact that the ‘Toronto Target’, or a similar version, was subsequently adopted by a number of states, including Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and EU member states.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, the appropriate interpretation of this norm shifted throughout the 1990s as global environmental governance came to be more broadly dominated by a discourse of ‘liberal environmentalism’.Footnote ¹⁸ As Bernstein explains, the ‘compromise of liberal environmentalism’ mitigates the economic disruptions that environmental protection may cause by absorbing environmental concerns into the liberal economic order itself; environmental protection has thus become seemingly dependent on securing continued economic growth and accumulation.Footnote ¹⁹

The growing salience of liberal environmentalism had a significant impact on understandings of how climate change mitigation should be pursued by the international community; while many states continued to promote domestic emission reduction targets as the most appropriate means of mitigation, this norm assumed a more liberal character throughout the 1990s. Due to intense pressure from the US, the UNFCCC featured only qualitative commitments for Annex I (industrialised) countries; quantitative commitments had appeared in an earlier draft of the convention text but all such references were excised in the final text.Footnote ²⁰ Instead, it was agreed that such specific matters should be negotiated later as part of a legal instrument to supplement the Convention. Accordingly, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol reinstitutionalised the idea that mitigation should be pursued via domestic targets, albeit in a rather compromised form that reflects the discourse of ‘liberal environmentalism’. In contrast to earlier environmental and atmospheric agreements, the Kyoto Protocol tied domestic targets to a set of ‘flexible mechanisms’ which would enable states to meet their commitments in the most cost-efficient manner by investing in GHG mitigation in less-developed countries, or buying emissions credits through a trading system.Footnote ²¹

In the absence of appropriate legal codes, the norms of climate governance initially established the boundaries of appropriate conduct for responding to climate change. Defining who should take responsibility for mitigating climate change, and how such mitigation should be pursued, the norms outlined above guided state behaviour and shaped the agendas of the preliminary negotiations. Of course, norms are not fixed and immutable; instead, they are fluid and open to contestation and reinterpretation. As these norms have diffused throughout the international system they have gradually lost much of their original focus on historical emissions and domestic mitigation, and instead have increasingly directed attention to future emissions and transnational mitigation options, such as emissions off-setting. The following sections of this article provide an explanation of how this shift has materialised throughout the norm diffusion process by analysing this process in the context of India.

Norm diffusion: domestic and international dynamics

The case of India is useful for exploring the diffusion of international climate governance norms. With a vast population, growing middle class, and an increasingly prominent role in the global economy, India has not gone unnoticed in international climate change negotiations. While some smaller developing states may have avoided engaging in normative debates about climate governance, this option has not been available to India: the weight of international expectations has given rise to normative congruence-building.Footnote ²² Understanding how India has positioned itself within normative debates on climate change requires looking beyond conventional conceptualisations of the relationship between domestic and international politics.Footnote ²³ An influential contribution to this literature has been Gourevitch's metaphor of the ‘second image reversed’, which is often evoked to describe how the international system shapes domestic institutions and interests (rather than merely being shaped by them as suggested by the ‘second image’ metaphor).Footnote ²⁴ Putnam's widely cited two-level game built on these metaphors by highlighting the ‘entanglement’ of domestic and international politics; in his two-level game, domestic political elites must simultaneously respond to pressure from domestic groups and interest coalitions, while maximising their bargaining power against their foreign counterparts in international negotiations. The complexity of this game, according to Putnam, lies in the fact that the rational choices available to political elites at the domestic level may conflict with the rational choices available to them at the international level.Footnote ²⁵ While looking beyond the negotiating context to the diffusion of international policies more broadly, Keohane and Milner are also concerned with the dynamics of political-economic incentives and constraints at the domestic and international levels.Footnote ²⁶ These works have generated important insights into the relationship between domestic and international politics, as well as into the strategic challenges that confront domestic actors in international negotiations. However, I argue that the explanatory value of these approaches is limited by their neglect of an important dimension of international and domestic politics, namely the ideational dimension.Footnote ²⁷ Constructivism is an alternative approach that prompts consideration of the ideational dimension in shaping domestic/global political dynamics. From a constructivist perspective, observed outcomes are the product of underlying norms, identities, and policy paradigms that have been institutionalised over time at both the domestic and international levels. Material conditions are not necessarily overlooked by scholars working within this tradition; indeed, material and ideational phenomena are considered to be intimately connected, but often the former are socially and politically consequential only by virtue of the meaning that is socially attached to them.Footnote ²⁸

Constructivist scholars including Checkel, Risse-Kappen, Cortell and Davis, Finnemore and Sikkink, and Bernstein have persuasively explained cross-national variation in the diffusion of international norms by emphasising the conditioning influence of domestic actors, institutions, norms, and political culture.Footnote ²⁹ This scholarship suggests that the successful diffusion of a particular international norm requires a reasonable degree of congruence between the norm and the domestic conditions of states. The perceived absence of congruence will prompt domestic actors to either reject an international norm or actively ‘localise’ the norm through an iterative process of congruence-building.Footnote ³⁰ As the case of India demonstrates below, this process is not necessarily or exclusively led by state-based actors themselves; instead, normative congruence may be achieved or maintained in cooperation with domestic and external non-state actors. Here I am attentive to two particular means by which congruence between a state's domestic conditions and international norms may be established: ‘framing’ and ‘grafting’.Footnote ³¹ Entman's definition of framing is useful here; he writes: ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation […]’.Footnote ³² Framing or ‘pruning’ an issue in a particular way can therefore render it congruent with the existing domestic conditions.Footnote ³³ ‘Grafting’, meanwhile, is defined as ‘institutionaliz(ing) a new norm by associating it with a preexisting norm in the same issue area, which makes a similar prohibition or injunction’.Footnote ³⁴ In a recent contribution to the literature, van Kersbergen and Verbeek have urged scholars to consider the possibility that the meaning of international norms may alter during the diffusion process. This possibility is reflected in their study of the norm of subsidiarity and its diffusion throughout the EU: once the member states accepted this norm, a political contest over its appropriate meaning emerged as state actors began institutionalising the norm within their domestic jurisdictions; the result was a reformulation of the original norm.Footnote ³⁵ Given the inherent fluidity of norms and ideational structures at both the domestic and international levels, congruence building should be understood as an integral and iterative aspect of the norm diffusion process;Footnote ³⁶ as the case study of India in this article demonstrates, domestic perceptions of normative congruence may be disrupted as either international norms or domestic conditions evolve. This case further suggests that contestation and compromise may be recurring features of the norm diffusion and congruence-building processes; as India's perceptions of normative congruence were disrupted, a period of contestation and compromise ensued as actors faced the challenge of rebuilding congruence between their domestic conditions and the international norms of climate governance.

Successful norm diffusion may depend on states reconciling international expectations with domestic conditions, but a question that remains is what determines the likelihood of success of such normative congruence building efforts? One perspective emphasises the importance of external pressure. Farrell, for example, suggests that in the absence of an instant match between domestic culture and international norms, ‘diffusion only occurs following a process of political mobilization whereby the target community is pressured into adopting new ways of thinking and doing’.Footnote ³⁷ Acharya, by contrast, outlines a trajectory of ‘localisation’ and identifies a set of domestic conditions for progressing from contestation to the institutionalisation of an eventual ‘syncretic normative framework’. These conditions comprise the prior recognition that aspects of the domestic normative order are inadequate; the presence of credible insider proponents of the international norm; scope for grafting the international norm onto some aspects of the existing normative order; and scope for legitimising those aspects of the existing normative order onto which the international norm has been grafted.Footnote ³⁸ The case of India discussed in this article reflects elements of these different perspectives. Certainly, there was a degree of pressure placed on India to engage with the normative debates of international climate change governance. As the focus of debates shifted increasingly towards future emissions and transnational mitigation measures, the need to reconcile international expectations with domestic conditions became more acute. In addition, as we will see in the following discussion, elements of India's domestic conditions were undergoing significant transformation during the 1990s. This transformation enabled, and was in turn strengthened by, the institutionalisation of a new liberal norm of transnational mitigation. The conditions for successful congruence-building were thus quite strong in India. But, as I will argue in the concluding section of this article, in seeking to build and maintain congruence with both the norm of CBDR and that of transnational mitigation, India has been forced to straddle competing and incompatible problem representations. This ultimately serves to undermine this state's position in international climate governance.

An account of how the international norms of climate governance have evolved is presented in the previous section of this article, but before exploring how India has positioned itself within these normative developments it is necessary to understand the domestic conditions which have affected India's position. A constructivist conceptualisation of the domestic conditions directs attention to three constitutive parts: the material conditions; the social structure; and the key actors which have authority to represent the state in international climate change negotiations, namely the environmental foreign policymakers. These constitutive parts of the domestic conditions are discussed in the following section before considering how they have interacted with the international normative structures to shape India's role in international climate change governance.

India's domestic conditions

Material conditions: The first feature of the domestic conditions that have affected India's role in international climate change governance is the material conditions. Two aspects are particularly salient in this context, India's national GHG emissions profile, and its ‘energy culture’, a term which refers to the domestic relationship between fossil fuels and development.Footnote ³⁹

In accordance with India's responsibilities under the UNFCCC, a national communication was submitted in June 2004; this report provided a detailed inventory of India's emissions for the year 1994 and, at the time of writing, remains the most recent official data available.Footnote ⁴⁰ At this time, India annually emitted approximately 1228.54 million tonnes (Mt) of GHGs, which equated to less than one tonne of CO₂ per person.Footnote ⁴¹ Consequently, although India is one of the largest emitters of GHGs, in per capita terms India's emissions were very small and amounted to just 28 per cent of the global average, and 4 per cent of the US' level.Footnote ⁴² More recent estimates of present and projected emissions reflect little change in these comparisons. In the year 2000, for example, India emitted approximately 1484.62 Mt of GHGs, which in per capita terms equates to approximately 6.5 per cent of the US' emissions.Footnote ⁴³ In accordance with India's projected trends in economic development and population growth, the country's emissions are projected to rise by almost 300 per cent by 2020, relative to 1990 emissions levels. This estimate takes into account various expected mitigation measures, including improved energy efficiency, promotion of renewable energy sources, and reforestation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Despite such high projected growth, India's per capita emissions level will remain half of the global average, and just 7 per cent of the US' level.Footnote ⁴⁵

The majority (61 per cent) of India's emissions are produced by the energy sector, including transport, industry, and residential consumption; followed by the agricultural sector (28 per cent); industrial processes (8 per cent); waste disposal (2 per cent); and land use, land-use change and forestry sector (1 per cent).Footnote ⁴⁶

Given that the energy sector is the greatest source of emissions in India, the domestic ‘energy culture’ is a highly relevant aspect of India's material conditions. India's per capita energy consumption remains one of the lowest in the world, but this fact masks the reality of large inequalities in energy consumption. Less than half of rural households have access to electricity; and even in urban areas 12 per cent of households are still deprived of electricity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Cooking is the main energy-based activity in rural subsistence-based households, and this is fuelled primarily by biomass, including dung, firewood, and agricultural wastes.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meanwhile, almost all coal- and gas-generated power is consumed by industry, and transport accounts for approximately half of India's total oil consumption.Footnote ⁴⁹ The expansion of industry and transportation since liberalisation in 1991 has intensified the demand for energy in India and has exacerbated the existing demand-supply gap in the country's energy sector.Footnote ⁵⁰ With 17 per cent of the world's population, India has just 0.8 per cent of the world's oil and gas reserves; hence, a large proportion of the country's commercial energy demand is met through its reasonably vast indigenous coal resources, as well as imported coal.Footnote ⁵¹ Given the cost competitiveness of coal relative to gas, the government assumes that it will remain the most important energy source until at least 2032.Footnote ⁵² However the high ash content and low calorific value of India's coal makes it highly polluting and GHG-intensive.Footnote ⁵³ Despite the dominance of hydrocarbons, efforts have been made in recent decades to diversify the energy mix by developing hydro and nuclear power, yet renewable energy still accounts for only 5.5 per cent of grid connected electricity.Footnote ⁵⁴

Domestic social structure: The second feature of the domestic conditions is the social structure, which can be understood as the range of policy paradigms that orient governance within a state. This understanding of the social structure draws on Hall's widely cited concept of ‘policy paradigm’, which he defines as the interpretive ‘framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and the kinds of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing’.Footnote ⁵⁵ While these paradigms tend to remain stable as taken-for-granted lenses through which the world and one's place in it is understood, they may occasionally undergo incremental changes or displacement via more radical ‘paradigm shifts’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Attending to the social structure in constructivist-informed research requires identifying those policy paradigms most relevant to the issue of interest.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the context of international climate change governance, three specific policy paradigms are relevant: the environmental, economic, and foreign policy paradigms. In the first instance, the environmental policy domain is governed by a paradigm of weak ‘sustainable development’. At the sub-state level, environmental concerns are quite salient as reflected in the strength of the environmentalist movement (according to one estimate, there are over 7000 environmentalist NGOs in India).Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the impact of this movement on India's role in international climate change governance has been limited by the fact that these NGOs tend to be exclusively concerned with local environmental issues: the issues which preoccupy international environmental negotiations rarely attract the attention of Indian environmentalist NGOs.Footnote ⁵⁹ Two exceptions are the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and The Energy Research Institute (TERI), which have been influential in defining India's priorities and positions in international negotiations on climate change.Footnote ⁶⁰ At the state level, the norm of ‘sustainable development’ has become increasingly salient in India over the past two decades. This is reflected in a number of publications from government and industry. In 2002, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) released a report outlining India's strategy for pursuing sustainable development; this strategy revolved around four key objectives: poverty reduction, empowering village-level governance, drawing on competences in science and technology, and improving environmental standards.Footnote ⁶¹ The 2006 National Environment Policy also recognises poverty alleviation as the dominant development imperative while acknowledging that natural resources must be sustained to secure the livelihoods of the Indian people.Footnote ⁶² The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)'s treatment of sustainable development provides what is perhaps a more realistic representation of the dominant interpretation of sustainable development in India. The CII's ‘Mission on “Sustainable Growth”’ suggests that India will need to increase its use of natural resources to accelerate the national rate of economic growth to, in turn, achieve the status of ‘developed country’ by the year 2020; to ensure this growth is sustainable, these resources should be used as efficiently as possible. The core purpose of this mission is defined as: ‘(t)o promote and champion sustainable growth in Indian Industry, without compromising on high and accelerated growth’.Footnote ⁶³ This subordination of sustainability to the economy is undoubtedly widely supported throughout government and business circles in India, as reflected in the United Front Government's decision in the late 1990s to exempt small businesses (comprising approximately 90 per cent of all Indian businesses) from environmental regulations to prevent expensive monitoring and a disruption to economic growth.Footnote ⁶⁴ Hence, despite the rhetorical salience of sustainable development within India, in practice sustainability is often compromised in the pursuit of greater economic development.

India's economic policy arena is one which has witnessed a ‘paradigm shift’ in the 1990s from what may be termed ‘Nehruvian developmentalism’ to ‘neoliberal globalism’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The economic policy paradigm that emerged in India's post-independence era reflected the political elites' commitment to the self-reliance principle of swadeshi (literally, ‘of one's own country’).Footnote ⁶⁶ Throughout the nationalist campaign for independence, this principle had been articulated to agrarian values and Gandhi's vision of India as a ‘village utopia’;Footnote ⁶⁷ yet, in spite of the high level of influence Gandhi commanded over the nationalist movement, his economic vision did not inspire the minds of those men who formed the Planning Commission, a body established in 1937 as a ‘neutral’ and ‘depoliticised’ group of scientific and economic experts to plan for the future independent state's development, and later to advise the state's civil service.Footnote ⁶⁸ These men instead shared the belief of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that agriculture was a backward vocation which ‘fragmented the country, confined man's vision to the narrow limits of his village, and was a breeding ground of ignorance, traditionalism, passivity, narrow-mindedness and superstition’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the post-independence era, swadeshi was articulated to self-reliant modernisation and large-scale industrialisation; any reliance on foreign capital should be strictly limited to the short term and have no influence on the orientation of development.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Guha notes, ‘self-reliance became the index of development and progress. From soap to steel and cashews to cars, Indians would meet their material requirements by using Indian land, Indian labour, Indian materials, and above all Indian technology’.Footnote ⁷¹ This policy paradigm persisted until the early 1990s when it was displaced by an emerging consensus among governing elites that liberalisation provided the most promising means of development. Whereas post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism sought to harness national wealth and the economy to produce a modern, industrialised, and self-reliant nation, the post-liberalisation model of development ties India's national progress to economic competitiveness and integration with the global market.Footnote ⁷² The economic reforms initiated by the Rao Government in 1991, and intensified by successive governments throughout the 1990s, were designed to ‘[…] accelerate technological change and modernise the Indian economy in order to make it efficient and internationally competitive’.Footnote ⁷³ While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss these reforms and their impacts in any detail,Footnote ⁷⁴ it is important to note here that the shift from Nehruvian developmentalism to neo-liberal globalism has fundamentally altered the interpretive ‘framework of ideas and standards’ that defines goals, problems, and policy instruments in the economic domain. The neo-liberal globalist paradigm also serves to empower new actors in this domain: the ‘producer-patriot’ which was privileged by the former paradigm has been displaced in favour of the affluent ‘cosmopolitan consumer’ and the export-oriented producer – identities exclusively reserved for those who are able and willing to engage with India's new role in the global market.Footnote ⁷⁵ The neo-liberal globalist paradigm is reflected and reinforced internally through local media, Hindi cinema, and political party campaigns (for example, Bharatiya Janata Party's ‘India Shining’), as well as externally through international marketing campaigns like those of the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF).Footnote ⁷⁶ These campaigns reflect that fact that the ‘gross domestic product’ (GDP) has come to define the wellbeing of the Indian economy, which, in the process, has contributed to the privileging of the globally-oriented producer over other economic actors.

This paradigm shift in economic policy has been accompanied by a significant shift in the foreign policy domain. India's approach to environmental foreign policy has been influenced by an important speech made by Indira Gandhi (then India's prime minister) at UNCED in 1972, in which she established a connection between the environment and the concerns of the Third World; the key message of this speech was that ‘(t)he environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The influence of this discourse on India's environmental foreign policymakers has been tempered in recent years by a shift in India's foreign policy orientation away from the Nehruvian tradition to a paradigm that is increasingly characterised by neo-liberal globalism.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Nehruvian foreign policy tradition, which was dominant throughout the first four-and-a-half decades of India's independence, may be understood as broadly reflecting liberal internationalism, and was characterised by a commitment to non-alignment, multilateralism, and Third World Solidarity.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the notion of non-alignment was originally conceived as providing a compass for India's own foreign policy, in the years following independence, Nehru also showed leadership in forming the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a forum focused on non-alignment with the superpowers as well as such principles as human rights, sovereignty, equality of nations, international justice and responsibility, and the rejection of war.Footnote ⁸⁰ The relative continuity in India's foreign policy paradigm from independence until the early 1990s is explained by the continuity in India's foreign policy environment, chiefly the bipolar international order, and tensions with China and Pakistan; as well as the fact that Nehru's successors were either unskilled in foreign policy or already committed to his principles.Footnote ⁸¹ The end of the Cold War, and the subsequent liberalisation of India's economy, catalysed a major reconsideration of the orientation of India's foreign policy.Footnote ⁸² In the absence of bipolarity, non-alignment was widely considered to have no relevance for India or the rest of the world; furthermore, as the economic policy paradigm began to shift, India's commitments to Third World Solidarity and multilateral diplomacy were increasingly perceived as a handicap. Although the legacy of Nehru's foreign policy continued to intermittently influence India's foreign policy during the 1990s and into the new century, this tradition has been increasingly displaced by a new tradition characterised by closer relations with the West (particularly with the US); greater emphasis on ‘pragmatism’ and strategic alliances, and greater emphasis on commercial diplomacy.Footnote ⁸³ Some scholars suggest that this new tradition is characterised by the adoption of an ideologically-neutral ‘pragmatism’ as a new foreign policy compass; this is reflected in India's increasing preference for strategic alliances in place of broad support for inclusive multilateralism and Third World Solidarity; illustrative is India's participation in the G-4, G-15, G-20, the India-Brazil-South Africa grouping, and the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.Footnote ⁸⁴ In contrast to those who characterise this position as pragmatic, Ramakrishnan suggests that pragmatism simply masks the ideological commitment to neo-liberal globalism, which is characterised by subordinating people's political interests and aspirations to the interests of the economy and accumulation, and limiting state involvement in the economy to promoting accumulation opportunities.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ramakrishnan's view is supported by the growing emphasis on commercial diplomacy in India's foreign policy; as Jakobsen notes, liberalisation in India saw primacy in foreign affairs ‘[…] given to economic diplomacy in order to convey the message to the world that the Indian economy was poised for massive and unprecedented modernisation’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The heightened salience of India's globally-oriented economy in the economic policy paradigm has prompted India's foreign policymakers to promote India as an aspiring major economic power and an attractive environment for investment.

India's role in international climate change governance

The emergence of the issue of climate change onto the international political agenda coincided with this period of significant transition in India's economic and foreign policies. It is unsurprising then that climate change did not attract the levels of concern in India that it did in some other countries. In fact, given these circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that the issue attracted the level of attention that it did. Perhaps influenced by the speed with which the Montreal Protocol negotiations had proceeded, India's then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, assumed a pro-active position in early climate change discussions. Reflecting a persistent allegiance to the Nehruvian tradition of foreign policymaking, Gandhi interpreted the problem of climate change through a North-South lens and actively sought to integrate the interests of the South into the climate change agenda.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1990, the Indian government organised the ‘New Delhi Conference of Select Developing Countries on Global Environmental Issues’ to exchange knowledge, highlight the links between disparate global environmental problems, and to mobilise cooperation among developing countries ahead of the first official climate change negotiations in late 1990.Footnote ⁸⁸ The most salient points presented at this meeting were the North's responsibility for generating the threat of climate change, and the importance of enabling the South to access the necessary resources for economic development and poverty alleviation.Footnote ⁸⁹ The North-South lens through which India's foreign policymakers interpreted the issue of climate change created the space for a loose ‘discourse coalition’ to emerge between these elites and India's grassroots environmentalist organisation, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).Footnote ⁹⁰ By 1991, the CSE had already established a case for basing climate governance on the principle of per capita shares of atmospheric space; this was intended to ensure that the countries of the North would greatly reduce their domestic emissions to allow those of the South to increase theirs as necessary for alleviating poverty.Footnote ⁹¹ Drawing on the CSE's line of reasoning, India's environmental foreign policymakers were able to establish congruence between their domestic conditions and the emerging norms of climate governance by framing the problem of climate change as one of globally inequitable development. Framing the problem in this way directed responsibility for mitigation primarily to the North and thus allowed India to actively participate in international climate negotiations without jeopardising the state's coal-dependent development trajectory. During early intergovernmental negotiations, India's chief negotiator, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, presented the CSE's original case for per capita shares of atmospheric space as the nation's formal position by proposing an ‘equitable formula’ for reducing global emissions, based on the convergence of CO₂ emissions at a common per capita level and taking into consideration historical emissions.Footnote ⁹² Such a formula would clearly promote India's development aspirations given this country's very small per capita emissions, relative to the global average. This position was also consistent with India's favoured representation of climate change as an inherently and exclusively political problem which reflected the global imbalance of GHG emissions and historically inequitable patterns of development. This representation is particularly salient in Dasgupta's statement at an early intergovernmental meeting in June 1991:

Although India's environmental foreign policymakers were unsuccessful in institutionalising per capita rights in the Climate Change Convention, the norms of CBDR and domestic emission reduction targets resonated with their understanding of climate change as an inherently and exclusively political problem and were consequently defended against attempts by some developed countries to dilute them. This defence was most prominent against the Norwegian proposal of Joint Implementation (JI), which was based on the premise that cost effectiveness and economic efficiency could be assured by allowing developed countries to claim credit towards their emission reduction targets by implementing mitigation projects in developing countries.Footnote ⁹⁴ India perceived JI as a violation of the CBDR norm by allowing the developed countries to dilute their responsibilities for limiting their own GHG emissions; it was also feared that JI would become a form of ‘neo-colonialism’, through which the North would appropriate more of the resources of the South and thereby exacerbate existing global inequalities.Footnote ⁹⁵

Between 1994 and 2001, when international debates were focused on the Kyoto Protocol and its flexible mechanisms, India's environmental foreign policymaking entered a phase of cautious compromise on some aspects of the climate change negotiations. On the norm of CBDR, India remained resolute and continued to frame the problem as one of globally inequitable development; this framing directed responsibility exclusively to the North and deflected attention away from India's own coal-dependent development strategies. The proposal to further differentiate the developing countries to negotiate commitments for ‘more advanced developing countries’ was described by India's environment minister, Kamal Nath, as an ‘insidious’ move which sought to conflate ‘luxury’ and ‘survival’ emissions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Buoyed by the growing support and influence that the Global Commons Institute's concept of ‘contraction and convergence’ was enjoying within the South and environmentalist networks, Nath continued to stress the importance of basing international climate change policies firmly on the principle of global equity.Footnote ⁹⁷

The role of an expanding equity-based discourse coalition in maintaining India's preferred framing of climate change was particularly evident at the first Conference of the Parties (COP-1) in 1995. With their confidence and authority undermined by the absence of Kamal Nath, the Indian delegation maintained a low profile throughout most of the meeting. However, Nath's arrival in the final days saw India reassume its leadership position within the South by convening a group of seventy-two ‘like-minded countries’ from the G77 to cooperate with the CSE and the Climate Action NetworkFootnote ⁹⁸ in drafting a ‘Green Paper’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This paper called for negotiations on a climate protocol to be finalised at COP-2, and for Annex I parties to adopt legally-binding emission reduction targets within the context of this protocol. To maintain the integrity of the CBDR norm, no further commitments for non-Annex parties were specified in the Green Paper.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This proposal, described by Nath as ‘a rare example of cooperation between government representatives and non-governmental organizations’,Footnote ¹⁰¹ eventually formed the basis of the Berlin Mandate, which laid out a negotiating process to produce a protocol by 1997.

While resisting efforts by some parties to reinterpret the norm of CBDR, India demonstrated a willingness to compromise on the norm of domestic emission reduction targets. This new phase of cautious compromise resonated with the domestic shits in economic and foreign policy paradigms outlined earlier. The phase of cautious compromise was marked by a shift away from strict Third World Solidarity, which characterised the Nehruvian tradition of foreign policymaking, to a willingness to compromise with developed country Parties on the norm of domestic emission reduction targets. While the original interpretation of this norm resonated with India's long-standing assumption that domestic objectives and goals ought to be pursued within the strict parameters of the nation-state (an assumption reflected in the principle of swadeshi), the neo-liberal globalist consensus that strengthened throughout the 1990s provided the necessary economic and foreign policy paradigms for gradually accepting the broader and more flexible understanding of the norm of domestic emission reduction targets that was emerging internationally.

The first compromise took the form of a pilot phase of Activities Implemented Jointly (AIJ): a bilateral mechanism through which all Parties could voluntarily cooperate on GHG abatement projects. At the insistence of India and other developing countries, AIJ would be purely experimental and not generate any credits towards meeting the emissions targets of the developed country Parties;Footnote ¹⁰² moreover, India's environment minister, Kamal Nath, insisted that voluntary transnational mitigation programs should not be ‘used as an excuse by the North to continue with their present profligate consumption patterns which are at the root of the unsustainable mess we find ourselves in’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Despite conceding to an international pilot phase of AIJ, India resisted pressure from the US, Japan, and others to accept proposals for mitigation projects in India.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Despite its limited success in terms of project numbers and partners, the negotiation of the AIJ effectively legitimised transnational mitigation as an adjunct to domestic mitigation for meeting domestic emission reduction targets; this in turn provided an opportunity for institutionalising a set of ‘flexible mechanisms’ in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ One of these mechanisms is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows developed countries to finance emission mitigation projects in developing countries in exchange for claiming the averted emissions as credits towards their own domestic targets.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Initially, India's foreign policymakers expressed dismay at this transnational turn in climate governance with one delegate conceding that ‘unsustainable patterns of living seem to be the dominating approach’ in international climate governance.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such assessments point to a perceived incongruence between the transnationalised norm of domestic emission reduction targets and India's domestic conditions; however, within a short period of time India's foreign policymakers had begun to engage with domestic and external non-state actors in such a way that secured normative congruence once again. Two specific conditions enabled this engagement. In the first instance, the increasing consolidation of a new economic paradigm characterised by neo-liberal globalism endowed the global market with a degree of domestic importance that hadn't been seen throughout the post-independence era. This, together with economic liberalisation, had empowered a new group of internationally- and competitively-minded industry actors (chiefly the Confederation of Indian Industries – CII) who were interested in engaging with global market actors.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The second enabling condition was the pragmatic/globalist turn in foreign policy and the rapprochement in Indo-American relations, which in turn enabled state and industry actors in the US to form an economically-oriented discourse coalition with industry and other non-state actors within India.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Throughout 1999, two US climate policy officials, Kathleen McGinty and Karl Hausker, were based at The Energy Research Institute (TERI) in New Delhi as senior visiting fellows with the objective of ‘develop(ing) more common ground between the US and India on climate change’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ McGinty and Hausker have recounted how the MOEF was initially quite hostile to the idea of the CDM, which one official likened to ‘[…] a dying man (an industrialised nation) asking for a blood transfusion from a friend (a developing country)’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet by the end of their twelve-month fellowships, a significant shift in the attitude of the MOEF and other ministries and industry stakeholders had been secured through formal and informal means. Some of the more prominent initiatives instigated by McGinty and Hausker included the Indo-US Dialogue on the Clean Development Mechanism, which brought together Indian and US business leaders to discuss the profitable opportunities presented by the CDM; and a ministerial meeting between India's Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, and US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, which produced a ‘Joint Statement on Cooperation in Energy and Related Environmental Aspects’. This statement included a resolution to work closely together to achieve an early agreement in the UNFCCC on the elements of the flexible mechanisms, as well as a resolution to ‘work closely together with other countries to develop […] international rules and procedures for the Kyoto Mechanisms, including the Clean Development Mechanism’.Footnote ¹¹² By establishing alliances with non-state actors and grafting the transnationalised norm of domestic emission reduction targets onto India's emerging economic policies and objectives, these US non-state actors were able to produce a perception of normative congruence among India's environmental foreign policymakers. This in turn has catalysed a significant change in India's position on international climate governance. But the actions of McGinty and Hausker were only consequential by virtue of the wider ideational shifts that occurred within India's economic and foreign policy domains. These shifts enabled the problem of climate change to be perceived differently by India's environmental foreign policymakers; rather than understanding climate change strictly as a political problem reflecting excessive consumption in the North, these domestic shifts created the possibility for understanding climate change as a technical problem of emissions per se. While the earlier perception directs responsibility exclusively to the North, the latter creates a possibility for the South to contribute to mitigation efforts.

Since 2001, India's environmental foreign policymakers have focused on maximising the opportunities that transnational mitigation can offer the country and its major industry interests. In stark contrast to the early to mid 1990s, in recent years India's environmental foreign policymakers have used their interventions in meetings of the UNFCCC to encourage more extensive use of the CDM. In the first session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties Under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), in 2006, India urged the developed countries to adopt more ambitious targets while allowing certain Annex I parties to make greater use of the CDM to fulfil these targets. Whereas India had formerly interpreted equity exclusively in North-South terms, now it was suggesting that ‘equitable burden sharing’ could involve the differentiation of developed countries to allow those countries that will incur higher compliance costs to meet a larger share of this target with credits generated through the CDM.Footnote ¹¹³ This argument was also repeated the following year at the fourth session of the AWG-KP, where the Indian delegation stated that one of the ‘building blocks for action’ should be ‘an expanded CDM that will enable Annex I Parties to take more ambitious QELROs (Quantified Emission Limitation and Reduction Objectives) and allow for enhanced mitigation in developing countries’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Meanwhile, the Government has focused internally on developing the necessary institutional apparatus for operationalising and expanding the CDM.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Government also plays an important role in ‘aggressive international marketing’ to maximise CDM investment against ‘competitors’ in the developing world.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This market discourse marks a significant departure from the Nehruvian tradition of foreign policy; indeed, it closely reflects the new prioritisation of ‘commercial diplomacy’ over nonalignment and Third World Solidarity.

The new commitment to ‘strategic partnerships’, which is characteristic of India's post-liberalisation foreign policy paradigm, is reflected in the country's decision to join the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP), in July 2005. This exclusive arrangement bypasses the norms of climate governance established by the UNFCCC: the commitments and responsibilities of the member parties are not formally differentiated, and domestic emission reduction targets are rejected. The focus is instead on cooperation to develop and implement technologies that will avoid disruption to the economic growth trajectories of all member parties, while potentially reducing the greenhouse gas intensity of their economies.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Although India and other Kyoto signatories within the APP were careful to emphasise that the initiative was designed to complement the Kyoto Protocol rather than compete with it, the norms of the APP clearly stand in opposition to those institutionalised in the UNFCCC.Footnote ¹¹⁸