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Radical Ecological Democracy: Escaping India's globalization trap

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Development Aims and scope

Abstract

The global economic and ecological crises can be seen as an opportunity to fundamentally question our paths of ‘development’, and move towards ideologies, policies, and practices of ecological sustainability and social equity. India in its current globalizing form, presents a vivid picture of unsustainability. But, Ashish Kothari proposes that in its ancient and new ideologies and its myriad grassroots experiments in alternatives, it could also be the harbinger of revolutionary changes in the way humans relate to the earth and to each other.

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Notes

  1. A Hindi term for ‘version’ or ‘manifestation’, commonly used for the various forms of gods and goddesses, and therefore apt here because ‘development’ in its various versions has been elevated to the status of an omnipresent, omnipotent ideology.

  2. www.millenniumassessment.org.

  3. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/blog/indias_demand_on_nature_approaching_critical_limits.

  4. www.ncasindia.org/public/staticpages/sez.asp, accessed 28 May 2009; Advocacy Internet Vol. VIII No. 3, May–June 2006, at www.ncasindia.org/public/AdvocacyInternet/ai_may_june_06.pdf; several articles on http://infochangeindia.org.

  5. The term used for India's indigenous or ‘tribal’ peoples, meaning ‘the original residents’. There is a complex debate on the various terms used for and by these communities, due to the very long history of influx and settlement of the Indian subcontinent, which we need not go into here. The percentage of population referred to here is what the Indian government officially recognizes as ‘scheduled tribes’, that is, those listed in a schedule of the Indian Constitution and given special protection and rights.

  6. http://www.planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/10th/volume2/v2_ch4_2.pdf, accessed 1 June 2009.

  7. All of which place India abysmally low on the UNDP Human Development Index, at no. 132 on a list of 179 countries in December 2008; see http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/, accessed 1 June 2009.

  8. Sainath (2009) estimates the number to be 182,936 between 1997 and 2007, and notes that the number has increased in the phase of economic globalization, with a majority of the victims being cash crop farmers.

  9. Haat is a local market in rural India.

  10. For several dozen case studies, see http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/sereport/ser/seeds/stdy_seed.htm; see also www.ddsindia.com, www.tarunbharatsangh.org, and Down to Earth Special issue ‘Good News’, at http://www.downtoearth.org.in/default20090115.htm.

  11. Decentralization has so far had very mixed impacts in India: widespread bureaucratic resistance, local power play, and lack of capacity amongst communities to handle decentralized functions, have undermined implementation across much of India, but in many states organized communities and civil society groups, and sensitive officials, have also managed to utilize it for people's benefit. For a detailed review, see various essays in Jayal et al., 2006.

  12. See Hasnat, 2005: 16–17; http://www.tarunbharatsangh.org/programs/water/arvariparliament.htm, accessed 1 June 2009.

  13. See Pangare and Pangare, 1992; Sakhuja, 2008; http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5669e/x5669e06.htm, accessed 1 June 2009.

  14. For examples, see Shiva et al., 1991; Agarwal et al., 1994; Humanscape, special issue on movements, October 2000; Kothari et al., 2003; Oommen, 2008).

  15. Providing greater local control of education, health, and other aspects in the North-East Indian state of Nagaland (http://www.nenanews.com/ANE%20June%201-15,%2007/special%20report1.htm, accessed 1 June 2009).

  16. For example, a 4-year process to produce a draft National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, see TPCG and Kalpavriksh, 2005.

  17. See for instance, Hines, 2000 and http://www.slowfood.com/.

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Proposes that grassroots experiments could bring revolutionary changes in the way humans relate to the earth

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Kothari, A. Radical Ecological Democracy: Escaping India's globalization trap. Development 52, 401–409 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2009.51

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