State–Community Synergies in Community-Driven Development

States can do much to tap community-level energies and resources for development if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is the creation of a developmental society and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, we illustrate how: (1) state efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and expanding non-crop sources of income can broaden the distribution of power in rural communities, laying the basis for more effective community-driven collective action; and (2) higher levels of government can form alliances with communities, putting pressure on local authorities from above and below to improve development outcomes at the local level. These alliances can also be very effective in catalysing collective action at community level, and reducing ‘local capture’ by vested interests. There are several encouraging points that emerge from these case studies. First, powerful institutional changes do not necessarily take long to generate. Second, they can be achieved in a diversity of settings: tightly knit or open communities; war-ravaged or relatively stable; democratic or authoritarian; with land reform or (if carefully managed) even without. Third, there are strong political pay-offs in terms of legitimacy and popular support for those who support such developmental action.     

Educational Space Settlement: Mantavya

The goal of the Educational Space Settlement proposed herein, which is called Mantavya (Hindi for “to prepare the preliminary sketch”), is to act as an all-encompassing education and training hub in space. The structure is designed with an awareness of the physiological, psychological, and aesthetic needs of future colonists in space to offer an almost Earth-like environment. There are six segments of the settlement serving educational, residential, and agricultural needs, which are built up around a central axis. These segments will be used to provide education in various research and development areas, which include study of agriculture, communication, life support systems, robotics, medical sciences, material sciences, and astronomy. The variable gravity at different locations will provide new horizons of research for the inhabitants. An unpressurized region below the segmented parts of the hub will provide a microgravity training zone for space walks and disaster management.     

Equity,justice and the SDGs: lessons learnt from two decades of INEA scholarship

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Environmental justice issues have been incrementally but consistently covered within this journal in the last two decades. This...     

Legal Steps Outside the Climate Convention: Litigation as a Tool to Address Climate Change

This article examines the recent academic interest in litigation as a tool to address climate change, as well as the surge of legal actions worldwide to bring the problem to the attention of judiciaries. This new interest reveals the frustration of legal scholars and activists at the slow rate at which policy makers are addressing the climate change problem. This article shows the slow build-up of academic interest in litigation, before moving on to analyse the kinds of legal causes of action that are being used in different parts of the world. Most of these cases have not been fully resolved, and it is more than likely that the judgments may not always be favourable to the plaintiffs, but at least a first step has been made to involve yet another forum for addressing the climate change problem.