Please join us at the ICI office on Monday, March 31st for a presentation given by Professor Jayashree Vivekanandan, Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi, India. Professor Vivekanandan’s talk is entitled Prospects for Environmental Governance in South Asia.
Regional efforts to preserve mountain landscapes that account for half of the world’s biodiversity hotspots raise pertinent questions for existing statist discourses and practices of territoriality. Firstly, how will states and sub-state actors negotiate divergent interests and approaches to natural resource management on issues such as benefit sharing? Secondly, to what extent can spatiality be read with the concept of ecological citizenship, which locates the individual as a key actor in conservation by drawing horizontal lines of association? Thirdly, what are the prospects for cross-border initiatives to reconcile conservation strategies devised at the national and regional levels with indigenous value systems, which traditionally regulate local resource use?
The presentation focuses on the Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL) Initiative, a transboundary Himalayan collaboration involving India, Nepal and China that seeks to conserve an area of shared cultural heritage and rich biodiversity.
Professor Vivekanandan’s research interests include critical approaches to International Relations theory, transboundary resource governance and environmental politics in South Asia. She is the author of Interrogating International Relations: India’s Strategic Practice and the Return of History (Routledge, 2011).