Institutionalizing Environmental Governance: Development, Democracy and Expertise

该项目力求将实地工作与对已发表文献的系统审查结合起来，从表面上定义环境治理，确定其基本的规范性原则，明确“民主”和“可持续性”等关键词在操作上的确切含义，并制定衡量采用环境治理模式的发展计划成功与否的标准。它还试图分析如何重新利用州专家社区，并将州官僚机构的一套新做法和程序制度化。此外，它试图发现将在微观环境中取得成功的技术和体制设计扩大到更大规模所需要的条件，或者将成功的模式转移到不同的文化背景。最后，但决不是最不重要的，它试图解决冲突的问题：在促成这种典范变革和环境治理制度化的过程中，国家各级官僚机构和技术官僚机构如何谈判不可避免的政治冲突？研究将集中在印度的三个领域：森林和生物多样性、水和可再生能源，印度在充满活力的民主背景下提供了大量案例研究。该计划结合了政治生态学和科学技术研究的见解，旨在成为对环境治理范式的里程碑式的分析，提供关于专业知识在第三世界环境和发展中的作用的开创性研究，从而增加对民主和技术的理论理解。

This project seeks to combine fieldwork with a systematic review of the published literature to define environmental governance ostensibly, identify its underlying normative principles, clarify exactly what the key-words, such as "democracy," and "sustainability" mean operationally, and lay down criteria to measure the success of developmental schemes that embrace the environmental governance model. It also seeks to analyze what it takes to re-tool state expert communities and institutionalize a new set of practices and procedures in state bureaucracies. Moreover, it seeks to discover what is entailed in scaling up technological and institutional design that have been successful in micro contexts to larger scales, or to transfer successful models across cultural contexts. Last, but by no means the least, it seeks to address the question of conflict resolution: how, in the process of engendering such paradigmatic change and institutionalize environmental governance are the inevitable political conflicts to be negotiated at various levels of state bureaucracies and technocracies? Research will focus on three sectors: forests and biodiversity, water, and renewable energy, in India, which offers a large number of case studies in the context of a vibrant democracy. Combining the insights of Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies, the proposed program aims to be a landmark analysis of the environmental governance paradigm, provide a path breaking study of the role of expertise in the environment and development in the third world, and thereby add to the theoretical understanding of democracy and technology.