Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017. xx, 258 pp, (Tables, graphs, figures, maps, coloured photos.) US$179.00, cloth. ISBN 978-3-319-44035-4.
This timely volume is informed and motivated by China’s and India’s emergence as “Planetary Powers” in the twenty-first century. Unprecedented economic growth since the 1980s, driven by market-centric neoliberal economic policies, has seen China and India begin to exert an increasingly decisive influence on the global biosphere. If this trend continues, then the environmental future is indeed bleak. But, as the editors and authors to the volume insist, there is hope. They believe the way forward lies in rejecting the market norms of neo-liberal capitalism and locating alternative practices that, while neglected by the mainstream, continue to persist in many parts of China and India. These practices, characterized by struggle and innovation, occur at diverse scales, from the local and subregional to the transboundary and multi-national.
In order to imagine alternative futures, the authors of the volume exhort us to take seriously the historical legacies and lessons that emerge from China’s and India’s millennia-long record of environmental thought and action. They also reject Western-centric frameworks, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, whose categories of direct and indirect drivers of change they criticize as too static to account for how ecosystems really work and evolve. Instead, the authors argue for the importance of environmental flows, local knowledge, and transboundary diversity. Key aspects include an emphasis on social innovations and recognizing that these social innovations are rooted not just in the market (as is commonly thought) but also in traditional knowledge. Accordingly, the chapters are written in a prospective tone: what can be done to achieve a better, environmentally sustainable future. The result is a volume full of hope, respectful of local conditions, and energized by the possibilities of bottom-up solutions.
Eight substantive chapters consist of case studies that flesh out this hope. They can be grouped into three categories that utilize different kinds of comparative and connective frameworks. In the first category are chapters 2 and 3, where Shikui Dong and Jayanta Bandyopadhyay provide macro-historical perspectives on the environmental histories of China and India. While useful summaries, their connection to the chapters that follow is assumed but not clearly demonstrated. In the second category are chapters 4, 7, 8, and 9. These offer explicit comparisons of different kinds of subregional units: rivers (4), landlocked provinces (7), coastal zones (8), and megacities on deltas (9). So, in chapter 4, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay offers a comparison of the fates of the Ganges and Yellow rivers. Similarly, in chapter 7, Nidhi Srinivas offers a thoughtful comparison of social innovations such as wood-burning stoves and technology sharing in southwestern Rajasthan, Telangana, and western Yunnan. Shifting our gaze to the coast, Sanjay Chaturvedi explores notions of resistance, justice, and participatory democracy among the economically and socially marginalized people who inhabit the environmentally threatened mangrove forests of the Sunderbans and Zhangjiangkou (in Fujian). Finally, using the method of patch dynamics and a range of intriguing visualizations, Victoria Marshall compares the mega-deltas of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna and the Yangzi-Qiantang to show that the urban-rural divide, far from being neat, is better represented as a mosaic of patchy and complex spatial patterns. Adding an urban design perspective to ecology, Marshall argues, can help imagine sustainable urban futures.
If the first two categories consist of comparisons, the third category represents transnational regions, where the emphasis is on connected and contiguous ecological zones that make a mockery of existing political boundaries. In chapter 5, Shikui Dong analyzes grassland management in three sites in the Hindukush Himalayas: Himachal Pradesh in India, Rasuwa district in Nepal, and Tainzhu County on the Tibetan plateau. He finds that pastoralists across his case sites have adapted to climate change by developing indigenous management strategies that draw upon traditional practices. In chapter 6, Dong partners with Nakul Chettri and Eklabya Sharma to offer a six-fold framework for transboundary biodiversity conservation across the Himalayas. Dong, Chettri, and Sharma emphasize that governmental and regional organizations need to investigate the intersections across these six dimensions (technical, environmental, social, economic, political, and ethno-cultural) if they are to achieve biodiversity conservation while also meeting the needs of local communities.
A volume as ambitious as this is bound to raise questions. Among these is the evident disjuncture between civilizational ideas on the one hand and the much-touted local/traditional practices on the other. How useful is the civilizational frame, then? Scale is clearly an important conceptual lens across many of the chapters, but it remains somewhat undertheorized. While we can readily admit the need to attend to global, regional, and local scales, it would have been helpful to offer a more systematic treatment of the concept, drawing upon the rich theoretical discussions that exist in fields as diverse as geography and hierarchy theory.
The volume’s optimistic tone is encouraging but also requires a certain suspension of belief. Although the desire to move beyond a neo-liberal market-driven capitalist system is laudable, the authors provide no indication of how viable such an expectation is in the near or long term. Politics is important here in at least two respects. First, in comparative terms, India and China represent different modes of governance, different modes of centre-local relations, and different modes of civil society. How does this difference influence the analyses offered across the chapters? Perhaps of even greater salience is the nature of political change within each country since 2012 and 2014. The possibilities of civil society action, NGO-led change, and greater responsiveness from the state, characteristics also identified by Andrew Mertha in his 2008 study of state-society negotiation over dam-building in China, appear to have dramatically changed since Xi Jinping’s ascension in 2012. BJP rule in India since 2014 has been accompanied by a wanton disregard for the environment and for the rights of local, frequently marginalized, populations. Considering these observations, a systematic analysis of the different kinds of actors—politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, technocrats, civil society members, locals—and what motivates them would have been useful.
The volume signals a much-needed attempt at collaboration between scholars of China and India. The India China Institute of the New School is to be complimented for making such collaboration possible. At the same time, the production is marred by typographical and grammatical errors. Many of the maps contain text that is illegible. The price tag ($129 eBook; $180 hardcover) is prohibitive for students and researchers alike. As “planetary powers,” China and India have taken to expanding their activities well beyond their borders in the last two decades. How they proceed will have great significance for the future of mankind. This book is a welcome contribution that helps us understand elements of that process.
Arunabh Ghosh
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA