“Preemptive Participation” and Environmental Awareness Across Indian Water Quality Policy

• Date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1070496517697768
• Author: Sya Buryn Kedzior
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

‘‘Preemptive

Participation’’ and

Environmental Awareness

Across Indian Water

Quality Policy

Sya Buryn Kedzior

1

Abstract

Public participation in environmental decision making is promoted in the Global

South as a core tenet of ‘‘good governance’’ associated with sustainability.

This emphasis on participatory governance has produced significant attention to

the importance of ‘‘environmental awareness’’ as a precondition of participation in

environmental governance. This article analyzes the connected discourses surround-

ing environmental awareness and participation in Indian water-quality policy, focusing

on North India’s Ganges River. Drawing on evidence from policy documents and

interviews with government officials and other key informants, it argues that the

emphasis on environmental awareness as a precondition of participation has allowed

the state to effectively forestall participation, to approach awareness raising as a

consensus-building activity, and to effectively rollback the regulation of polluting

industries. Moreover, conditional participation has increased opportunities for

state agencies to control the conditions and terms of ‘‘awareness,’’ contributing to

the effacement of alternative environmental knowledges.

Keywords

participatory governance, environmental awareness, sustainability, pollution

Sustainable development and sustainability policies have become de rigueur in

environmental management and economic development practices. Following the

enshrinement of principles of sustainability in the Rio Declaration and Agenda

Journal of Environment &

Development

2017, Vol. 26(3) 272–296

!The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1070496517697768

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1

Department of Geography and Environmental Planning, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:

Sya Buryn Kedzior, Department of Geography and Environmental Planning, Towson University, Towson,

MD 21252 USA.

Email: skedzior@towson.edu

21, commitments to sustainable environmental governance were incorporated

into policies addressing environmental protection and resource management in

many countries. This is particularly true in the global South, as inf‌luential inter-

national institutions like the World Bank promoted sustainability and its asso-

ciated principles over the past few decades. It has certainly been the case in

India, where environmental policies drafted following the 1991 neoliberal eco-

nomic restructuring increasingly emphasized the sustainable management of

natural resources.

Participatory governance was established as a core tenet of sustainable devel-

opment at the 1992 Rio Conference, where it was promoted as a component of

‘‘good governance’’ and identif‌ied as ‘‘essential to achiev[ing] sustainable devel-

opment’’ (1992 Rio Declaration, Principles 10 and 20). The promotion of par-

ticipatory approaches came, at least in part, in response to critiques related to

the inef‌f‌iciency and unresponsiveness of institutions like the World Bank and

their project cycles (Edwards, 2005; Santiso, 2001; Tilbury, Stevenson, Fien, &

Scheuder, 2002; Wendt, 1999; Younis, 1997). These critiques focused on the

negative social impacts caused by structural adjustment programs and spon-

sored projects that failed to account for variations in local needs, as well as

their tendency to pass laws, implement programs, and institute projects without

including the input, inf‌luence, or involvement of people who would be af‌fected

by those decisions (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). Participatory governance promised

to empower people to control the decisions and actions that af‌fect their own

lives. These ‘‘local people’’ (also called stakeholders, end users, the ‘‘commu-

nity’’ or ‘‘public,’’ and targeted or af‌fected populations) would work with gov-

ernment and nongovernment agencies in a shared system of decision making and

project implementation, theoretically producing better results from the pro-

grams and projects in which they were involved. But, participatory governance

rarely takes this idealized form and has been shown to reify existing power

relations and institutionalize government-led managerialism (Cooke &

Kothari, 2001).

The promotion of public participation is palpable in water-quality policies in

India, where participatory approaches have been touted as a solution to the

problems associated with top-down environmental governance and centralized

policy making. But, despite the Central government’s discursive commitment to

participatory governance, public participation in water resource management

has yet to materialize and water quality governance continues to follow a largely

top-down model. This contradiction is well illustrated in the governance of water

quality in the Ganges River Basin (GRB), which has served as the national

model for water pollution management since the 1950s. Policies governing

water quality in the river have espoused participatory governance while none-

theless maintaining that river water quality management is most ef‌fective when

controlled by central or intrastate authorities at the basin-wide scale (cf. 2002

National Water Policy, NWP). State agencies have addressed this contradiction

Kedzior 273