Sumit Vij - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Sumit Vij
Environmental Policy and Governance, 2020
Climate change adaptation governance involves multiple actors, operating from local to national l... more Climate change adaptation governance involves multiple actors, operating from local to national level, and during their interactions, several challenges may surface and act as barriers to adaptation. While existing studies attempted to create an exhaustive list of barriers by focusing on “what” is occurring, we continue to have a meager understanding of “how” or “why” barriers emerge in the governance process. Selecting Bangladesh as a case study area, we identify the mechanisms that cause the emergence of barriers in the climate change adaptation governance process. We particularly focus on the barriers that emerge through interactions among actors. We base our research on data from key-informant interviews and a systematic literature review. Our analysis reveals that there are at least five mechanisms that are involved in the emergence of barriers: enclosure and exclusion, boundary control, organizational inertia, belief formation, and frame polarization. Our identification of common mechanisms provides insights on actors' roles and activities in adaptation governance and elucidates the processes through which actors' interactions lead to barriers. This mechanism-based analysis of barriers will help to address and navigate through the barriers more effectively to ensure successful adaptation. As climate change is becoming mainstreamed in development plans and policies in our study area, identifying the mechanisms of adaptation barriers can elucidate how development and climate adaptation strategies are affected by identified barriers.</p
Environmental Science & Policy, 2017
This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long... more This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long-term climate change adaptation. Presently, it is unclear what approaches are used in the existing policies to cope with the future climatic changes. Our research framework consists of two components. First, we identify and define key characteristics of adaptation policy approaches based on a review of scientific journal articles. The key characteristics identified are institutional flexibility, adaptive nature, scalability and reflexivity. Second, we analyse the presence of these characteristics in the climate change adaptation policies of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our findings show that the four South Asian countries contribute to only 8% of the total journal articles on adaptation policy, with least papers representing Pakistan and Nepal. Reviewing the adaptation policies, we find that except for the Climate Change Policy of Nepal, none of the policies discusses transboundary scale adaptation approaches. The identified adaptation policies lack focus on shared transboundary resources between the countries, and instead focus at national or sub-national scale. This is reflected by relatively low scores for the scalability characteristic. All the countries show high scores for institutional flexibility, suggesting that changing roles and responsibilities between government agencies for adaptation planning and implementation is accepted in the four countries. We conclude that to prevent a loss of flexibility and to promote scalability of shared transboundary resources, policy approaches such as anticipatory governance, robust decision-making, and adaptation pathways can be useful for long-term climate change adaptation. Adaptation policy approaches are defined as the ways in which climate policies are designed and implemented to reduce the impacts of climate change (Dessai and Hulme, 2004). Long-term adaptation policy approaches consider a period between 30 and 100 years (Government of Japan, 2010). As decision-makers face the challenges of addressing
Geoforum, 2016
Common property resources (CPRs) have provided a basis for sustenance to countless households, es... more Common property resources (CPRs) have provided a basis for sustenance to countless households, especially those that lack access to private assets. Several factors have eroded the access of CPR dependent communities, such as, conscious policy decisions of the state, elite domination, the process of land consolidation and commercialization. In the period of neo-liberal reforms in India, after 1991, the nature of threats to the commons has changed. Emerging factors such as urbanization, land acquisition and real estate development have played a more significant role in depleting the CPRs. The commons have increasingly come to bear the ecological foot-print of urbanization as they got acquired or encroached upon for urban expansion and required infrastructure. This compromises the livelihood security of those who depend on them for sustenance. There is a need for debate on alternative and more sustainable models of urbanization.
WIREs Water, 2017
The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested ... more The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater.
Land Use Policy, 2016
ABSTRACT
Vision: The Journal of Business Perspective, 2014
The article reflects on the urbanization process and the social interactions that have played a r... more The article reflects on the urbanization process and the social interactions that have played a role in diminishing access to common property resources (CPRs) for the vulnerable residents of the peri-urban Gurgaon. It emphasizes on the factors responsible for changing access and usage. Coupled with uncertain rainfall, these factors have reduced the dependence on and changed the usage of the CPRs in the two peri-urban villages—Budheda and Sadhrana. The article shares the field evidence of how social and political institutions shape access to resources affecting the livelihoods of the vulnerable groups, especially agriculture and animal husbandry. Lastly, it provides evidence of changing gender relations around the tasks of natural resource collection and use with increasing urbanization. These nuances raises the questions on the policy gaps based on the community perceptions and evidences in the field.
Earth System Governance, 2021
Despite the proliferation of power approaches to study climate change, there is little focus on h... more Despite the proliferation of power approaches to study climate change, there is little focus on how to deal with the negative effects of power in climate change adaptation (CCA) policy-making. CCA literature provides little insight into understandings of manifestations of power that can create negative effects, especially in the context of South Asia. This review answers the question: How can CCA policy actors deal with the negative effects of power during the policy-making process? We used a two-layered systematic literature review to identify various manifestations of power that are responsible for negative effects in CCA policy-making in South Asia and to determine power-sensitive design principles (PDPs) to address these manifestations of power. We conclude that although the four PDPs are no panacea for dealing with the negative manifestations of power, they are useful considerations when engaged in long-term CCA policy processes.
Mountain Research and Development, 2021
European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to ... more European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to increase in the future. These mountain regions experience rapid changes, which influence social-ecological systems in the lower-mountain and floodplain regions of Europe. There is scattered evidence across different strands of academic literature on the ways in which the impacts of changing climate in mountain regions are addressed and adaptive capacity is enhanced. Using a systematic mapping review, we mapped English-language scientific journal articles that analyzed the climate change adaptation options that are planned or implemented in European mountain regions. Our understanding of how academic literature has investigated climate change adaptation is critical to identifying key knowledge gaps and research foci. Following the Reporting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses in environmental research protocol, 72 scientific articles published between January 2011 and August 2019 ...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2017
Based on secondary data from the National Sample Survey Offi ce and a household-level survey of f... more Based on secondary data from the National Sample Survey Offi ce and a household-level survey of four villages in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the study found that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has a number of direct and indirect benefi ts. Overall, it was found that, in both rural Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, women's participation in the MGNREGS has been encouraging and benefi cial.
Management of the freshwater resources has been a global challenge, especially for transboundary ... more Management of the freshwater resources has been a global challenge, especially for transboundary river waters (TBW). Management of such communal goods or common resources becomes difficult as the interests of the diverse stakeholders involved will always vary. The assumption that the basin actors will share a common understanding and sympathy towards the issues associated with the basin, cannot be held as true. Only rarely there will be common characteristics present among the knowledge and information shared with the stakeholders regarding the crisis associated with TBW basins. In fact, the various case studies conducted on this discourse show that different regions along the boundary will have diverse level of interplay in the political dimension as well as during the stage of actual resource management (Adams, Brockington, Dyson, & Vira, 2003). The final consequence of water sharing amongst the riparian nations and the level of management success will rely on the dynamics of the ...
Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban South Asia
Farmers across India are protesting the apathy of the state towards the agricultural sector, whic... more Farmers across India are protesting the apathy of the state towards the agricultural sector, which is facing a triple crisis – economic, ecological and existential. This chapter attempts to locate the changing dynamics of agriculture at a frontier where a geographically specific articulation of this crisis comes to the fore: in Budhera, a peri-urban village bordering Gurugram city in the Indian state of Haryana. The village is still largely agrarian but undergoing rapid changes under the influence of (peri-)urbanization. Our ethnographic research investigates the juxtaposition of these urbanization processes with the more general impacts of climate variability on peri-urban agriculture. Although climate variability plays out at a larger scale than the urbanization processes, the conditions for peri-urban agriculture derive from an intersection of both. The results show how dimensions of agrarian livelihoods such as cropping choices, irrigation cycles, sharecropping arrangements, dec...
Sustainability, 2020
The citizen science approach has gained momentum in recent years. It can enable both experts and ... more The citizen science approach has gained momentum in recent years. It can enable both experts and citizen scientists to co-create new knowledge. Better understanding of local environmental, social, and geographical contexts can help in designing appropriate plans for sustainable development. However, a lack of geospatial data, especially in the context of developing countries, often precludes context-specific development planning. This study therefore tests an innovative approach of volunteer citizen science and an open mapping platform to build resilience to natural hazards in the remote mountainous parts of western Nepal. In this study, citizen scientists and mapping experts jointly mapped two districts of Nepal (Bajhang and Bajura) using the OpenStreetMap (OSM) platform. Remote mapping based on satellite imagery, capacity building, and mobilization of citizen scientists was performed to collect the data. These data were then uploaded to OSM and later retrieved in ArcGIS to produce...
Brahmaputra is a unique river system and if managed well, it can be the engine for economic and r... more Brahmaputra is a unique river system and if managed well, it can be the engine for economic and regional development. However, it requires an integrated basin-wide approach combined with social, economic, political, cultural and legal considerations along with a scientific and technological paradigm. This is only possible if the basin countries communicate and interact with each other to foster a spirit of cooperation.
Environmental Policy and Governance, 2020
Climate change adaptation governance involves multiple actors, operating from local to national l... more Climate change adaptation governance involves multiple actors, operating from local to national level, and during their interactions, several challenges may surface and act as barriers to adaptation. While existing studies attempted to create an exhaustive list of barriers by focusing on “what” is occurring, we continue to have a meager understanding of “how” or “why” barriers emerge in the governance process. Selecting Bangladesh as a case study area, we identify the mechanisms that cause the emergence of barriers in the climate change adaptation governance process. We particularly focus on the barriers that emerge through interactions among actors. We base our research on data from key-informant interviews and a systematic literature review. Our analysis reveals that there are at least five mechanisms that are involved in the emergence of barriers: enclosure and exclusion, boundary control, organizational inertia, belief formation, and frame polarization. Our identification of common mechanisms provides insights on actors' roles and activities in adaptation governance and elucidates the processes through which actors' interactions lead to barriers. This mechanism-based analysis of barriers will help to address and navigate through the barriers more effectively to ensure successful adaptation. As climate change is becoming mainstreamed in development plans and policies in our study area, identifying the mechanisms of adaptation barriers can elucidate how development and climate adaptation strategies are affected by identified barriers.</p
Environmental Science & Policy, 2017
This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long... more This paper analyses and assesses how existing policies and approaches in South Asia consider long-term climate change adaptation. Presently, it is unclear what approaches are used in the existing policies to cope with the future climatic changes. Our research framework consists of two components. First, we identify and define key characteristics of adaptation policy approaches based on a review of scientific journal articles. The key characteristics identified are institutional flexibility, adaptive nature, scalability and reflexivity. Second, we analyse the presence of these characteristics in the climate change adaptation policies of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our findings show that the four South Asian countries contribute to only 8% of the total journal articles on adaptation policy, with least papers representing Pakistan and Nepal. Reviewing the adaptation policies, we find that except for the Climate Change Policy of Nepal, none of the policies discusses transboundary scale adaptation approaches. The identified adaptation policies lack focus on shared transboundary resources between the countries, and instead focus at national or sub-national scale. This is reflected by relatively low scores for the scalability characteristic. All the countries show high scores for institutional flexibility, suggesting that changing roles and responsibilities between government agencies for adaptation planning and implementation is accepted in the four countries. We conclude that to prevent a loss of flexibility and to promote scalability of shared transboundary resources, policy approaches such as anticipatory governance, robust decision-making, and adaptation pathways can be useful for long-term climate change adaptation. Adaptation policy approaches are defined as the ways in which climate policies are designed and implemented to reduce the impacts of climate change (Dessai and Hulme, 2004). Long-term adaptation policy approaches consider a period between 30 and 100 years (Government of Japan, 2010). As decision-makers face the challenges of addressing
Geoforum, 2016
Common property resources (CPRs) have provided a basis for sustenance to countless households, es... more Common property resources (CPRs) have provided a basis for sustenance to countless households, especially those that lack access to private assets. Several factors have eroded the access of CPR dependent communities, such as, conscious policy decisions of the state, elite domination, the process of land consolidation and commercialization. In the period of neo-liberal reforms in India, after 1991, the nature of threats to the commons has changed. Emerging factors such as urbanization, land acquisition and real estate development have played a more significant role in depleting the CPRs. The commons have increasingly come to bear the ecological foot-print of urbanization as they got acquired or encroached upon for urban expansion and required infrastructure. This compromises the livelihood security of those who depend on them for sustenance. There is a need for debate on alternative and more sustainable models of urbanization.
WIREs Water, 2017
The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested ... more The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater.
Land Use Policy, 2016
ABSTRACT
Vision: The Journal of Business Perspective, 2014
The article reflects on the urbanization process and the social interactions that have played a r... more The article reflects on the urbanization process and the social interactions that have played a role in diminishing access to common property resources (CPRs) for the vulnerable residents of the peri-urban Gurgaon. It emphasizes on the factors responsible for changing access and usage. Coupled with uncertain rainfall, these factors have reduced the dependence on and changed the usage of the CPRs in the two peri-urban villages—Budheda and Sadhrana. The article shares the field evidence of how social and political institutions shape access to resources affecting the livelihoods of the vulnerable groups, especially agriculture and animal husbandry. Lastly, it provides evidence of changing gender relations around the tasks of natural resource collection and use with increasing urbanization. These nuances raises the questions on the policy gaps based on the community perceptions and evidences in the field.
Earth System Governance, 2021
Despite the proliferation of power approaches to study climate change, there is little focus on h... more Despite the proliferation of power approaches to study climate change, there is little focus on how to deal with the negative effects of power in climate change adaptation (CCA) policy-making. CCA literature provides little insight into understandings of manifestations of power that can create negative effects, especially in the context of South Asia. This review answers the question: How can CCA policy actors deal with the negative effects of power during the policy-making process? We used a two-layered systematic literature review to identify various manifestations of power that are responsible for negative effects in CCA policy-making in South Asia and to determine power-sensitive design principles (PDPs) to address these manifestations of power. We conclude that although the four PDPs are no panacea for dealing with the negative manifestations of power, they are useful considerations when engaged in long-term CCA policy processes.
Mountain Research and Development, 2021
European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to ... more European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to increase in the future. These mountain regions experience rapid changes, which influence social-ecological systems in the lower-mountain and floodplain regions of Europe. There is scattered evidence across different strands of academic literature on the ways in which the impacts of changing climate in mountain regions are addressed and adaptive capacity is enhanced. Using a systematic mapping review, we mapped English-language scientific journal articles that analyzed the climate change adaptation options that are planned or implemented in European mountain regions. Our understanding of how academic literature has investigated climate change adaptation is critical to identifying key knowledge gaps and research foci. Following the Reporting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses in environmental research protocol, 72 scientific articles published between January 2011 and August 2019 ...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2017
Based on secondary data from the National Sample Survey Offi ce and a household-level survey of f... more Based on secondary data from the National Sample Survey Offi ce and a household-level survey of four villages in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the study found that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has a number of direct and indirect benefi ts. Overall, it was found that, in both rural Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, women's participation in the MGNREGS has been encouraging and benefi cial.
Management of the freshwater resources has been a global challenge, especially for transboundary ... more Management of the freshwater resources has been a global challenge, especially for transboundary river waters (TBW). Management of such communal goods or common resources becomes difficult as the interests of the diverse stakeholders involved will always vary. The assumption that the basin actors will share a common understanding and sympathy towards the issues associated with the basin, cannot be held as true. Only rarely there will be common characteristics present among the knowledge and information shared with the stakeholders regarding the crisis associated with TBW basins. In fact, the various case studies conducted on this discourse show that different regions along the boundary will have diverse level of interplay in the political dimension as well as during the stage of actual resource management (Adams, Brockington, Dyson, & Vira, 2003). The final consequence of water sharing amongst the riparian nations and the level of management success will rely on the dynamics of the ...
Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban South Asia
Farmers across India are protesting the apathy of the state towards the agricultural sector, whic... more Farmers across India are protesting the apathy of the state towards the agricultural sector, which is facing a triple crisis – economic, ecological and existential. This chapter attempts to locate the changing dynamics of agriculture at a frontier where a geographically specific articulation of this crisis comes to the fore: in Budhera, a peri-urban village bordering Gurugram city in the Indian state of Haryana. The village is still largely agrarian but undergoing rapid changes under the influence of (peri-)urbanization. Our ethnographic research investigates the juxtaposition of these urbanization processes with the more general impacts of climate variability on peri-urban agriculture. Although climate variability plays out at a larger scale than the urbanization processes, the conditions for peri-urban agriculture derive from an intersection of both. The results show how dimensions of agrarian livelihoods such as cropping choices, irrigation cycles, sharecropping arrangements, dec...
Sustainability, 2020
The citizen science approach has gained momentum in recent years. It can enable both experts and ... more The citizen science approach has gained momentum in recent years. It can enable both experts and citizen scientists to co-create new knowledge. Better understanding of local environmental, social, and geographical contexts can help in designing appropriate plans for sustainable development. However, a lack of geospatial data, especially in the context of developing countries, often precludes context-specific development planning. This study therefore tests an innovative approach of volunteer citizen science and an open mapping platform to build resilience to natural hazards in the remote mountainous parts of western Nepal. In this study, citizen scientists and mapping experts jointly mapped two districts of Nepal (Bajhang and Bajura) using the OpenStreetMap (OSM) platform. Remote mapping based on satellite imagery, capacity building, and mobilization of citizen scientists was performed to collect the data. These data were then uploaded to OSM and later retrieved in ArcGIS to produce...
Brahmaputra is a unique river system and if managed well, it can be the engine for economic and r... more Brahmaputra is a unique river system and if managed well, it can be the engine for economic and regional development. However, it requires an integrated basin-wide approach combined with social, economic, political, cultural and legal considerations along with a scientific and technological paradigm. This is only possible if the basin countries communicate and interact with each other to foster a spirit of cooperation.