We are excited to share the following book review by Nilanjan Ghosh discussing a joint publication from our third cohort of ICI Fellows, Environmental Sustainability from the Himalayas to the Oceans: Struggles and Innovations in China and India (Springer, 2017). This book was officially launched at our April 2017 Mountains and Sacred Landscapes Conference in New York City. Ghosh’s review first appeared in The Third Pole, and was later picked up be The Wire in India.
In his review Ghosh writes:
Environmental Sustainability from the Himalayas to the Oceans: Struggles and Innovations in China and India (Springer International, 2017), is one of the seminal attempts by Chinese and Indian scholars to report on critical issues of environmentalism in the two countries.
The uniqueness of the book lies not in its mere reporting of Chinese and Indian cases by respective scholars – and providing a comparison between each nation’s approach – but in the comparative and objective analyses by its authors; Shikui Dong, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay and Sanjay Chaturvedi.
When it comes to research in such a trans-disciplinary interface, it is expected that gaps in compartmentalised disciplinary thinking will be addressed, which this book does so well. At one level, the book acknowledges that environmentalism, as explained by struggles and innovations, has emerged from developmental thinking of growth-fundamentalism. This has been prevalent in emerging economies, especially China and India. At another level, the book presents a statement on the possibly symbiotic relation between the two apparently contending notions of biodiversity conservation and human development, through the evolution of appropriate institutional frameworks for environmental governance.
Ghosh provides an excellent overview of their new book, as well as pointing out its relevance for a variety of different audiences, including economists, social scientists and policymakers.
You can read the original post at The Third Pole here or the reprint on The Wire here.