Articles by Kanchan Chopra

The Ministry of Environment and Forests by its hasty order of 20 December 2013 has set in motion events that go against the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel and the High Level Working Group. Decisions with respect to the Western Ghats - 39 sites within which now have the World Heritage tag and are the repository of unique biodiversity rich regions - will now go back into the hands of individual state governments, driven by their own short-term economic and electoral interests.

A tribute to the economist, Elinor Ostrom, who went far beyond the public-private goods dichotomy to understand the evolution of societal frameworks and develop the institutions and development framework. She challenged the notion of "tragedy of the commons" and her fi eld experiments helped understand in some of the critical tenets of institutional analysis to provide the rationale behind citizens' abilities to craft institutions to cope successfully with commons in some settings though not in others.

In the context of development and its impact on the environment, we need to understand "change", the kinds of change that systems can absorb, the "good" change and distinguish it from the "abrupt" change which systems cannot cope with. We also need to understand how to increase and sustain the capability of people, economies and nature to deal with change. And for this, science, policy and practice need to fashion modes of working together. They are themselves three components of a structure that can help us to move forward in a sustainable and dynamic manner. The argument here is that a systems approach using some notions from resilience theory will provide pointers towards how this can happen.

The Nobel Prize in Economics co-awarded to Elinor Ostrom marks a rare departure from the traditional approach of the selectors which hitherto has been characterised by adherence to sub-disciplines more explicitly recognised as falling within the discipline of economics, rather than those that govern an economic system from its exterior, created at the interface of political economy, economics and social anthropology. This essay is a tribute to her work taking into consideration the implications of her thought in the context of governance of commons in general, and in south Asia in particular.

An overview of the Millennium Ecosystem Synthesis Report, which took five years to prepare and discusses on changes over the past 50 years in the ecosystems of the world.