Institutional Framework for Resilience-Enabled Green Growth Strategies: A Case Study of India

Resilience has become an increasingly important concept in India’s green growth policy framework. The extant policy framework in the country conceives of green growth as part of the wider development imperative, with the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change recognizing “poverty eradication along with green growth” as central to India’s sustainable development narrative, and the country’s Thirteenth Finance Commission defining green growth as a narrative that enables rethinking growth strategies with regard to their impact on environmental sustainability and inclusiveness. In recent times, initiatives such as LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment) and Panchamrit commitments in the context of climate change capture the green development strategies in the country comprehensively, spanning areas such as electric mobility, renewable energy, agriculture, housing, and forests. The Indian government has initiated several policies to promote green growth, locating them within the framework of development with co-benefits. It is within this evolving institutional policy landscape that the framework of resilience acquires salience. In the Indian institutional landscape, there are concerted processes initiated to integrate developmental interventions with resilience thinking, although the governmental policy discourses have not systematized resilience into the existing policy frameworks. This entry situates resilience within the green growth developmental strategies in two key areas of policy interventions, that is, agriculture and social protection. Both the sectors are characterized by community participation from below as well as top-down resilience strategies initiated by the government, yielding substantive benefits in terms of yielding resilience outcomes.