Rethinking Environmental Governance: Exploring the Sustainability Potential in India

Abstract

In recent years, environmental governance, its nature, uses, and modalities are enthusiastically coming into the limelight of the academic and administrative community. The dynamic new approaches to environmental governance have made valuable inroads for sustainable governance. Yet this remained insufficiently harnessed in India, both theoretically and operationally. Not only that, there is a paucity of practicable guidelines to run the existing system holistically. This inductive research examines the nature, dimensions, problems, and idealised situations concerning good environmental governance in the Indian context. Both subjective and objective consideration of the available literature and perception study embodies the foundation of this endeavour. It is debated that governments are no longer the sole agent to ensure good management practice and non-state actors are increasingly coming into the limelight of sustainable community building and coordinated network development. Still, the democratic legitimacy of the private stakeholders is questionable, but the incompetence of public sectors to develop and promote a comprehensive framework for the governance of the environment pushes the system to move forward towards partnership building. This chapter calls for delivering an insightful and adaptable framework capable of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating the issues regarding environmental governance in dissimilar social, economic, political, and ecological ambiences where diverse environmental problems and modes of governance prevail. Therefore, idealised plans, models, and attributes are conceived in this chapter to meet the exhortations of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).