The Taj Ambassador Hotel, New Dehli
The Center for the Advanced Study of India and the Centre for Policy Research (CPR, with support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation) jointly organized a conference on "India's Options in Climate Change Negotiations” in Delhi, India on March 6-7, 2009.
The aim of the conference was to examine the different bargains – both international and domestic – that India will have to strike if it is to meet the challenges of global climate change. Given the many complex challenges that climate change poses, responding to it will involve restructuring economies and ways of life, mobilizing new technologies, creating innovative systems of finance, and perhaps even new political arrangements and institutions. No one conference can cover the multiple dimensions of this challenge. This conference focused on the different bargains India might have to strike, both domestically and internationally, to respond to the challenges of climate change. The emphasis was not on merely collecting a list of possible measures that might be necessary to achieve this goal. Rather this conference examined the ways in which these bargaining options might be embedded in political economy, both domestic and international, and how the frontier of possibilities of this political economy can be shifted to meet these new challenges.
Climate Change Conference Papers
CASI and CPR have commissioned a number of papers that examine India's technology/economic and political options in five fields central to the climate change debate: finance, urbanization, energy, agriculture, trade. Each of these papers, authored by preeminent experts in the field will be accompanied by three commentaries by other leading experts and policy makers. The idea is to create a conversation that is rigorous and path breaking.
The August 1, 2009 Issue of Economic & Political Weekly (Vol. 44, No. 31) has published the conference papers along with an article authored by CASI Director, Devesh Kapur, CPR President, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and University of Chicago doctoral student, Radhika Khosla that highlights various key issues raised in the conference and offers analysis and interpretation of the main points of discussion.
Read the article and full papers here.