Independent Environmental Regulation in India: Less an Authority and more a Process from Below

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 614-626
Author(s):  
Tishyarakshit Chatterjee

With India’s well-intentioned environmental laws and legal interpretations in place, there is still a perceptible weakness in the enforcement of her environmental regulations. This is ascribed to the centralised departmental structure and process of implementation, which prioritise clearances of developmental projects over monitoring and cleaning up of already polluted environments. Although in a democratic set-up, a lack of transparency and participation of knowledgeable stakeholders in decision-making are other process weaknesses noticed. Establishing an Independent Environmental Regulatory Authority has been tried repeatedly but given up mainly because its effectiveness depends on the same resources support as at present, on reliable primary field-level environmental data, not gathered regularly now and on sustained political support. Technically analysing the issues involved, this article suggests a process shift towards a locally relevant, transparent, decentralised, participative and area-science–value-based approach that can strengthen environmental regulation from below.

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 749-773
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fisher

There is considerable concern and debate about the economic impacts of environmental regulations. Jonathan Fisher, former Economics Manager at the Environment Agency in England and Wales, reviews the available evidence on this subject. Section 2 presents estimates of the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. Section 3 examines the impacts of environmental regulations on economic growth, innovation and technical change as well as impacts on competitiveness and any movement of businesses to less pollution havens. He questions call for greater certainty regarding future environmental regulations, whereas in fact there should be calls for less uncertainty. This section then suggests how this could be achieved. This section then finishes with an overview of the available evidence. This includes an examination of the Porter Hypothesis that environmental regulations can trigger greater innovation that may partially or more than fully offset the compliance costs. Section 4 then sets out principles for how better environmental regulation can improve its impacts on sustainable economic growth and illustrates how the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive is a good example of the application of these principles in practice. Section 5 reviews current and recent political perspectives regarding developments in environmental regulations across the EU and shows how the United Kingdom (UK) has successfully positively managed to influence such developments so that EU environmental regulations now incorporate many of these principles to improve their impacts on economic growth. Section 5.1 then examines the implications of Brexit for UK environmental regulations. Finally, Section 6 sets out some best practice principles to improve the impacts of environmental regulation on sustainable economic growth, innovation and technical change.


Author(s):  
Magnus Nord ◽  
Magnus Ysander ◽  
Tim Sullivan ◽  
Mayur Patel

OBJECTIVE: In 2012, Patient Safety (PS) in AstraZeneca was facing a situation with multiple challenges, scientifically and structurally. To meet these and support AstraZeneca’s ambition to return to growth after years of patent expiry, we undertook a project to fundamentally revisit ways of working to create an organisation set up to provide strategic safety in support of drug project decision-making. METHOD: In this paper, we describe the challenges we faced, the project to deliver changes to respond to them, and the methodology used. The project had two main components: creating a new operating model and simplifying the procedural framework. RESULTS: It was delivered in a focused effort by internal PS resources with cross-functional input. The framework simplification resulted in a 71% reduction in procedural documents and a survey of PS staff revealed an increase in satisfaction of 10%–20% across all scores. CONCLUSIONS: With >3 years of observation time, this project has provided AstraZeneca with a PS organisation able to provide strategic safety, supporting successful portfolio delivery, while ensuring patient safety and maintaining compliance with global pharmacovigilance regulations. It has driven efficiency and set the foundation for continued organisational evolution to meet future business needs in an everchanging environment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 2907
Author(s):  
Shiwen Liu ◽  
Zhong Zhang ◽  
Guangyao Xu ◽  
Zhen Zhang ◽  
Hongyuan Li

As for the academics and policymakers, more attention has been given to the issue on how to reduce environmental pollution through the cooperation of environmental regulation and local officials’ promotion incentives. With the use of a city-level panel data of 266 Chinese cities from 2005 to 2016, this study preliminary explores the impacts of environmental regulations, local officials’ promotion incentives, and their interaction terms on urban environmental pollution at national and regional levels by using the spatial Durbin model. The results indicate that the impacts of environmental regulations and local officials’ promotion incentives on urban environmental pollution have achieved the desired goal with the other’s cooperation, and their interaction term’s coefficients on urban environmental pollution are significantly negative. Moreover, spatial heterogeneity is established, and the uneven development of urban environmental pollution among different regions deserves more attention. In order to effectively reduce the level of urban environmental pollution in China, the government should focus on such solutions as enhancing the implementation and supervision efficiency of environmental regulation, optimizing the performance appraisal system of local officials, improving the synergistic effects of environmental regulations and local officials’ promotion incentives, and establishing a multi-scale spatial cooperation mechanism based on both geographical and economic correlations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095968012110183
Author(s):  
Igor Guardiancich ◽  
Oscar Molina

We explore the factors behind the long-term erosion of National Social Dialogue Institutions (NSDIs) to provide insights about the conditions for their revitalization. By applying policy analysis insights into the industrial relations field, we argue that limited policy effectiveness goes a long way towards explaining the erosion experienced by many NSDIs worldwide in recent years. Drawing on a global survey and on case studies of NSDIs in Brazil, Italy and South Korea, we show that these institutions’ policy effectiveness crucially depends on combinations of their problem-solving capacity, an encompassing mandate to deal with relevant socioeconomic issues and an enabling environment that grants the inclusion of social dialogue into decision making. With regard to rekindling their role, the article provides substantial evidence that two sub-dimensions of effectiveness are key: enjoying political support and having an ‘effective mandate’ as opposed to relying on just a formal remit to deal with socioeconomic issues of interest.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0169796X2110012
Author(s):  
Sudha Vasan

India has set up one of the first national-level legal bodies, the National Green Tribunal (NGT), dedicated exclusively to address cases under environmental laws. My research follows a case filed in the NGT by an indigenous community against a hydel power project in the western Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, examining how diverse and opposing parties in this case represent themselves as environmentalists. It reveals a narrative sphere where entirely opposite actions and actors are legitimated in and through the NGT in environmental terms. This article suggests that green courts provoke green narratives and examines how diverse actors respond and engage with this demand. Individuals are interpellated in this juridical field to understand and present themselves as environmentalists. Environment is a meta-narrative in this juridical field, constituting environmentalist subjectivity of all actors within this field by the very process of hailing them.


2014 ◽  
Vol 668-669 ◽  
pp. 1374-1377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Jun Wen

ETL refers to the process of data extracting, transformation and loading and is deemed as a critical step in ensuring the quality, data specification and standardization of marine environmental data. Marine data, due to their complication, field diversity and huge volume, still remain decentralized, polyphyletic and isomerous with different semantics and hence far from being able to provide effective data sources for decision making. ETL enables the construction of marine environmental data warehouse in the form of cleaning, transformation, integration, loading and periodic updating of basic marine data warehouse. The paper presents a research on rules for cleaning, transformation and integration of marine data, based on which original ETL system of marine environmental data warehouse is so designed and developed. The system further guarantees data quality and correctness in analysis and decision-making based on marine environmental data in the future.


The Youth Olympic Games were introduced in 2010 with the aim to bring young athletes not only an experience of competition on the world stage, but also to help them learn about the Olympic values, explore other cultures and develop the skills to become true ambassadors. The Lausanne 2020 Games provided an excellent opportunity to develop innovative concepts for health promotion and sports-related prevention. The enthusiasm across various sectors of society (political, academic and economy) empowered us to bring together multiple skills to materialize the IOC’s pledge. We developed communication concept around key sports-related issues targeting the competitors and population of our region. We set up pavilions hosting the various modules in Lausanne, at the Olympic Villages (Lausanne Vortex and St. Moritz), where the modules could be tested and videos were presented. Deep Impact is a virtual reality immersion into concussion, And You …? explores the perceptions of sports-related abuse through five excerpts of blockbuster movies. The Safety Clips for youth athletes introduce ten typical adolescent sports medicine topics in a youth-friendly format. Youth and elite (role model) athletes delivered the messages rather than professionals, whilst the content was true to current scientific knowledge. Three key elements emerged. 1. The power of interdisciplinarity and innovation to promote healthy sports. 2. Adolescence is the best time to sensitize athletes and their entourage. 3. The need for strong institutional and political support to develop health prevention in sport. We look forward to building on these positive experiences and bring prevention and health in sports forward.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-203
Author(s):  
Martin Holubčík ◽  
Jakub Soviar

Abstract Modern controlling is an interdisciplinary field that allows management to manage properly, thereby creating the basis for good decision-making. Logistics operations in smart companies need to be not only properly set up, but also properly controlled and improved. The purpose of the article is to analyze the controlling environment in a selected company and point out possible improvements in logistics activities and devices, with a view to preventing different types of problems. For this purpose, observations of the internal logistics processes in a selected company were used and quantified to assess its internal state. On the basis of the data, controlling measures are put forward to improve the management of the company’s logistics activities. The results of the research highlight the opportunities that exist through controlling activities to collect and analyze information about the logistics activities of a company. By doing so, employees can be given greater responsibility for the fulfilment of their tasks and contribute to the streamlining of logistics processes. For managers, the implementation of controlling represents a change in the way of thinking and managing a company.


Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER J. LARKHAM ◽  
JOE L. NASR

ABSTRACT:The process of making decisions about cities during the bombing of World War II, in its immediate aftermath and in the early post-war years remains a phenomenon that is only partly understood. The bombing left many church buildings damaged or destroyed across the UK. The Church of England's churches within the City of London, subject to a complex progression of deliberations, debates and decisions involving several committees and commissions set up by the bishop of London and others, are used to review the process and product of decision-making in the crisis of war. Church authorities are shown to have responded to the immediate problem of what to do with these sites in order most effectively to provide for the needs of the church as an organization, while simultaneously considering other factors including morale, culture and heritage. The beginnings of processes of consulting multiple experts, if not stakeholders, can be seen in this example of an institution making decisions under the pressures of a major crisis.


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