Dissertation Nikita John

Working Title

The role of participation in planning sustainable urban infrastructure, towards reducing consumption emissions in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, India

Aligning Development and Climate Change Mitigation in Urban India

Although India's emissions are expected to increase, research shows that it is possible to have improved human well-being with reduced resource requirements that would help maintain relatively low emissions, but only if planned ‘equitably’ (IRP, 2017, 2018). To this end, the Indian government signing on to the SDGs in 2015 adds to the expectation of this suggested ‘equitable’ planning. Especially with Goal 11, where the signatory is in acceptance of the political mandate to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable; and with goal 16.7, to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision making at all levels. With the adoption of the New Urban Agenda and regular involvement in the annual High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development, India maintains its appearance of interest in pursuing the SDGs (GoI, 2016; UN-Habitat, 2016).

The process of infrastructure planning in most of urban India has faced continuous challenges (Chakravarty & Negi, 2016) and the varying responses of states to COVID-19 have helped highlight the flaws embedded in the planning and design of supply infrastructure. It has however also brought to the foreground instances of India’s civil society making up for the lack of the state’s capacity (Tandon & Aravind, 2021). This further substantiates the need for looking towards other actors and governance processes that can reflect bottom-up demands and supplement the state’s capacity. Also to revisit existing ideas on governance to incorporate new actors into planning and implementation processes (Roy, 2015) contributing to the growing field of Global South planning theory.

To harness the existing mechanisms for achieving the SDGs and the need for revisiting actors and processes that reflect bottom-up demands, this research looks into the role of household’s participation in supporting demand-based action for curbing consumption emissions (Barreiro-Gen et al., 2019; Dubois et al., 2019). In the global south, the political scenario adds to the messiness of the climate mitigation problem, there is lesser research also owing to the lack of data based on which sound policy could have been made in the past.  However now, there are increasing possibilities of calculating carbon footprints of consumption at the city level for the Indian context and using it as a basis for climate change mitigation action (Lee et al., 2021; Never et al., 2020; Pichler et al., 2017).

The goal of this research is to identify the growing capabilities present in urbanites and use the existing inertia in the field of sustainable development to suggest better governance of climate mitigation. The case of the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi will be used as a basis to explore, if and how, the participation of the growing urban middle-class and the accounting of its consumption emissions, can contribute towards planning sustainable urban infrastructure.

The project is expected to run from 2020-2023 and will be supervised by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Cathrin Zengerling, LL. M. (Univ. Michigan) of Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany and Dr.-Ing. Manisha Jain of Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) Dresden, Germany

Publications: Updates on the project will be communicated on researchgate.