Publication Year: 2023

Strategies for green industrial and innovation policy–an analysis of policy alignment, misalignment, and realignment around dominant designs in the EV sector

Summary

Governments in industrialized as well as emerging economies are racing to implement policies to accelerate clean energy innovation and capture the economic benefits of decarbonization. This paper explores which combination of technology-push and demand-pull policies best situates a country to lead in clean energy innovation, as new or dominant designs emerge and replace older technologies. A new analytical framework for green industrial policy is introduced regarding the alignment, misalignment, and deliberate misalignment of policies. This framework is applied to battery electric vehicle drivetrain technology to examine the use of policy alignment and misalignment by countries with big automakers as they pursue strategic green industrial policy. We find that countries that achieved early and sustained (not inconsistent) policy alignment gained a first-mover advantage compared with countries that deliberately or accidentally misaligned their policies. We also find that first-mover advantage can be lost due to deliberate misalignment of policies caused by an inability of governments to effectively incentivize their firms to develop and deploy cleaner and more efficient technologies. In situations where governments adopt misaligned or conflicting policies, incumbent industries tend to pursue their prior comparative advantage and maximize return from investments in prior technologies. We also find that deliberate misalignment of policies can be an effective catching-up strategy.

Read more

Uneven and Combined Development and the Politics of Labour in an Eastern Indian Coalfield: Shifts and Changes from Late Colonialism to Neoliberalism

Introduction

Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development has been discussed extensively in the literature on extractive industries in the Global South. The debates originated in studies on Latin America but they are equally relevant for any other country of the Global South. In the Indian context, the development of extractive industries such as coal mining rests on, reproduces and constantly re-combines unevenness between India and other countries as well as within the country. This was the case when large-scale industrial mining began in India during the colonial period, primarily for railways, such as the East Indian Railway, and for local industries and export trade (Ghosh 1977). Mining continued to set the trajectory after the country gained Independence in 1947, when the state expanded the extraction of coal to feed its ambitious project of rapid industrialization in the name of ‘development’. Both, the ‘temples of modern India’ – as the first Prime Minister Nehru called the large integrated steel mills – and the large coal mines were concentrated in the subnational states in central and eastern India, such as Odisha, Jharkhand (formerly part of Bihar) and Chhattisgarh formerly part of Madhya Pradesh) (Das 1992; Adduci 2012; Adhikari and Chhotray 2020). As is well known, the expansion of open-cast coal mines entailed a plethora of environmental degradation as well as the large-scale dispossession and displacement of usually marginal agriculture-based communities and the dismantling of their agrarian structure (Nayak 2020; Noy 2020). The changing industrial policies since Independence also re-created and re-combined unevenness in the labour regimes, first by expanding the formalization of the erstwhile almost exclusively casual mining labour forces and later on by re-informalizing them.

Read more

Media, Politics and Environment: Analyzing Experiences from Europe and Asia

Introduction

Environmental protection has not equally established itself as a permanent fixture in the political systems of all countries: to date, governments and entire societies have responded to environmental challenges in a variety of ways, and concrete environmental policy is still a highly national matter. Moreover, the perception of environmental problems varies considerably on a global scale. The reasons normally cited for these differences largely stem from the environmental policy debates themselves, e.g. poverty, ignorance, capital interests, etc. In contrast, this book shows that concrete environmental policy emerges from a complex interplay of mass media and political conflicts: first, the mass media provide the framework for national environmental policy through agenda-setting, framing and scandalization; second, the mass media thereby change values in the political and social discourse, e.g. by altering the perception of global commons and expanding the possibilities of interest articulation; and third, this can lead to political decision-making processes in which legal and other measures for environmental protection are enforced. The book systematically compares industrialized countries such as Germany and Japan with several rapidly emerging countries in South and Southeast Asia.

Read more

State’s Commitment to Environmental Governance in India: Struggle Between Developmental Pressure and Sustainability Challenges

Summary

Over the last 50 years since environmentalism first exploded onto the world political agenda, the environment has been one of the most controversial and rapidly growing areas of public policy. The green movements in North and local grass-root movements in the South countries have elevated the debate for environmental policymaking and governance. Countries in both North and South have enacted several policies and regulations for environmental protection. However, these policies have been criticized due to their superficial protective coverage, absence of concrete measures and poor execution.

Taking these contexts in the background, this chapter has tried to examine the concept and practice of environmental governance in India. It has provided a historical overview of the environmental governance and also highlighted the challenges and opportunities in the different spheres of environmental decision making by taking some examples. Methodologically, the paper would be based on a path-dependent analysis of the environmental governance in India. This chapter argues that balance in the environment-development trade-off is necessary to meet growth objectives and the enforcement measures do not necessarily obstruct the growth. Further, more public engagement as well as creative politics are required for better environmental decision making.

Read more