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In addition to writing this newsletter and doing plenty of dad-ing, I’m also an editorial consultant at the Centre for Policy Research, India’s premier think tank. There has been some news about CPR of late – for more on that, please read Adam Tooze, Sankarshan Thakur, Sparsh Aggarwal, Vinay Sitapati, The Hindu and more.
But today I want to talk about a new series I worked with CPR on, to commemorate the institution’s 50th anniversary this year. Over the coming months, we plan to bring you flagship conversations with CPR faculty on their research, policy practice and engagement with the most critical questions of our age.
The first interview was with Navroz Dubash, a professor at CPR where he also runs the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment. Dubash has worked on climate change since the 1990s, when it was a little-known subset of the broader environment movement, and he has since become one of the most important voices on the subject.
His career has featured landmark research papers, agenda-setting edited volumes, two authored books and key roles on a number of official and advisory committees in India and at the global level.
He was a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations’ panel which publishes landmark reports on the state of climate change research. Dubash’s work led to CPR being the overall anchor institution and technical knowledge partner for the Indian government’s Long Term-Low Emissions and Development Strategy.
In the first part of our conversation, Dubash talks about working on climate change back in 1990 - well before it was in vogue, whether it is frustrating to still be going over questions of climate change vs development that have been around since then, why the Climate Initiative at CPR turned into the Initiative on Climate, Energy and the Environment, and why it’s important to make academic work accessible for wider audiences.
I’ve included an excerpt of the interview below, but you can read the entire first part here, with the second part coming later this month. If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here.
Thank you for being with us here. I wanted to start at the very beginning. If I’m not incorrect, you started off studying engineering many years ago before deciding that was not exactly for you. So could you tell us a little bit about how you came to the policy world? Did you stumble onto it?
I did tread the South Asian path of being an engineer and as an undergraduate, I was fortunate to be in a place where you weren’t locked into your choices, in a US university. And I found myself enjoying my political science, history, economics much more than I was enjoying my engineering. And so at one point, there was a fork in the road. I decided that I really didn’t want to be an engineer for the rest of my life and therefore why waste the opportunity to study things I really did enjoy?
I had a conversation with a senior, somebody who is now a friend of CPR who was also drifting away from engineering and encouraged me to take the step. And so I had the chance to go and walk through the Narmada Valley at the time when that was the big flash point around development and environment. [It] was a very formative experience for me. I met people like Medha Patkar and others and I just found it tremendously exciting, so I decided to roll the dice. I had a very tough conversation with my father, as you can imagine, who in later years, to his credit, would read annual reports of companies and they start talking about ESG – environmental and social investing – and say, well, maybe you were a little bit ahead of your time. But at that time it was a tough family conversation!
Was there anyone in the family that was in this field? Or was it a complete left turn?
Absolutely, not just a left-turn in terms of the subject matter. I think there was maybe one cousin who had a PhD, but otherwise we’re not from a family of academics. So it was unusual. And, having studied at a relatively elite university, choosing to spend my summer coming back and walking through the Narmada valley was something that also was a little bit of a head-scratching experience.
What’s really interesting is that after that I, as part of my education, had to do what are called policy conferences and policy task forces. And one of them was around climate change. I wasn’t particularly interested in climate change, but these two strands [development & climate change] – both came out of my undergraduate experience – and really have defined much of my future work.
And that was at the very, very early days of the climate conversation in 1989. We did a little undergraduate experiment where we did a mock negotiation. And because it was so early it got published. And because it had the grand sounding name of the Princeton Protocol, people assumed there was a bunch of faculty who had written it. In fact, it was a bunch of undergrads. So it got cited and then my first job actually was also in that area.
When I was looking for a job, I got a couple of rejections and got a bit dispirited. And then I went to one of the organisations that had worked with the activists around the Narmada Valley, [who] said we don’t really have any work but our colleagues who work in the climate area do.
That was 1990. In two years time, the Rio Earth Summit was about to be held – what has now become the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Before those negotiations occurred, there was a proto-network of civil society organisations which were mostly dominated by American and a couple of European and Australian organisations. They said: ‘We don’t really understand how this plays in the rest of the world. If we show up and ask to be part of these conversations and it’s a bunch of developed countries’ typically white men, why would the rest of the world want us there? We need to have a broader spectrum.’
So they hired me at the ripe age of 21 to set up a global network [the Climate Action Network] on climate change from Asia, Africa and Latin America and bring in people from all these parts of the world. It was just an absolutely incredible first job. I had no idea what I was doing. I started faxing people around the world. Among the people we brought in, back in the day, were Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, for whom climate change was some kind of external issue and they weren’t really paying attention at the time. They felt there was a distraction from, understandably, the real bread-and-butter livelihood environmental issues.
But I kept sending them FedEx packages of documents so that they would have material and over time, to their credit, they very much drew the links between the issues they cared about and climate change became part of the network and then they wrote this landmark paper, ‘Global warming in an unequal world‘, that that still gets cited widely today.
When I was hired for the job, I was to be located at the Environmental Defence Fund in the US. When I met the director of EDF, Fred Krupp, he asked me about my interests. As I talked, he said, ‘You know? Frankly, you don’t seem that interested in climate change. You seem more interested in development.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s true. But that’s going to be true of most of the people who I’m trying to persuade to work on this issue, so it’s probably a good thing that I understand where they’re coming from.’ And he laughed and said, ‘OK, that’s a really smart Alec answer, but I’ll take it.’ But it is interesting reflecting back that this strand of ‘how do you bring development into conversation with climate’ is something that has more or less dominated my career in the years since.
It’s hard for those of us who grew up hearing about climate change to even imagine what it was like when you had to persuade people that it mattered. Did you have to convince yourself also?
Absolutely. In our first meeting [at the Climate Action Network], the developed country folks said, ‘As a civil society movement, let’s propose that developed countries reduce their emissions by X percent’. I think it was 50% by the year 2000 in 10 years time, which is ridiculous looking back on where we are now. ‘And developing countries will do the same thing a few years later.’
Immediately some of the WTO activists in the room said ‘hang on a second, that basically would commit us in perpetuity to a lower level of emissions’. And the developed country folks scratched their heads and said, ‘huh, maybe that’s true’, because that was the Montreal Protocol model. In a weird kind of way, we’ve been having the same conversation ever since. How do you allocate who gets to emit how much? From that point to me, the interesting question was really: If you care about development, by which I mean not just GDP, but a decent quality of life for people, what is the relationship of doing so to carbon? And how does it tie to both local choices and global choices? So when you ask if I had to persuade myself when I went on to do grad school, I had a hangover of a question, I had to ask myself about carbon markets, because I really was very suspicious and I remained very suspicious of carbon markets because in a lot of cases and this gets a bit technical, it is not about a market of an actual credit, it’s about what’s called an offset, which is, are you reducing emissions from a hypothetical baseline and that’s again a conversation that hasn’t gone away for 20 years.
The Guardian just had a series of articles on exactly this point. So after I dealt with my hangover and wrote my masters thesis on this, I said, I actually want to step back and I had a some kind of romantic idea of an elite Indian probably coming from my Narmada experience. Not knowing much about rural India, which is where the real India lies and so on and so forth, all those kinds of romantic urban elite visions. And I said I need to find a way of getting out there and so after a bunch of reading, I zoomed in on the use of water markets in Gujarat which were a very interesting empirical phenomenon. These Gujarati farmers were selling water back and forth within villages with these, 2,3,4 kilometer long pipelines, very complex markets. Some economists were saying that this is a great thing, and some sociologists and political scientists were saying this is pure exploitation. And I wanted to figure out which of the two was right.
After my Master’s and PhD, I wrote a book called ‘Tubewell Capitalism’ and I didn’t think about climate for several years. Then a job came along that was interesting in a completely different way from anything I’d done before: which was to study how the shift in capital flows for development from largely public sector flows to this boom of private sector flows, which culminated in the Asian financial crisis, and what that then meant for the environment.
It goes all the way back to the World Bank and the Narmada Valley project, because what environmentalists used to do was say ‘we’ll squeeze the bank and the bank in turn will make sure that projects have decent displacement conditions and so on.’ You can’t do that if most of the money is private. So, what do you do?
What I learned from that experience, and this was at the World Resources Institute, is that the climate conversation was a little sand pit off in the corner where environmentalists were sent off to play. The big decisions were happening in other places around regulation, around private banks. And the flows of those monies really shaped development prospects. That led me to do deep dives on policy restructuring in the forest sector and the electricity sector in a cross-country way and I got really interested in the electricity sector. I approached these as mainstream development questions. What shapes how countries decide to restructure their electricity sectors? And this was the moment of privatisation, liberalisation and so on and so forth of the electricity sector in India and other places. I got very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I wrote a paper called Power Politics.
I was terribly thrilled because it was the headline paper in EPW. As an aside, note how incredible an institution like EPW really was. That same issue had papers by Amartya Sen and Jeff Sachs. But as a fresh graduate, this paper was deemed more topical and was made the headline paper.
Then I felt that sitting in the US was just too stratospheric. I enjoyed my time doing research in India and so I persuaded my partner, and we both made a move to India for what we thought was two or three years and we kept extending it. And then we decided to just not move back. I taught at JNU for a while, I was at NIPFP for a while and then I landed at CPR in 2009. And institutionally, it was a much more comfortable fit for me than those other institutions. They had their merits, of course. But I like the freewheeling intellectual atmosphere. It suited my multidisciplinary kind of approach as there was a lot of freedom. There was a lot of lack of hierarchy. I didn’t have to call anybody ‘sir’ and nobody called me that either. I relished that culture.
It was only in 2007 that I re-engaged with climate. And that was the moment of the Bali Conference of Parties, [when the countries decided] let’s do a bunch of action plans and see. The interesting thing is those plans became a really important way to bring the development and climate conversation together. Until that moment, the objective was let’s treat this as a diplomatic problem and separate out climate and development. But 2007 was the bridge moment. That was an interesting space where one could ask the question: How do you do development while keeping in mind climate change, both on the mitigation and the adaptation side? And should we be doing that? That’s where I saw an opening and that’s where I came to CPR to try and build a platform through which to ask that question.
