ABSTRACT
The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) allocated the task to a subnational unit to formulate the state’s specific State Action Plan on Climate Change (SAPCC) in sync with eight national missions, as defined in the union policy. Despite the decentralized efforts on environmental issues, the climate change discourse in India has primarily missed out on an investigation on the bottom-up role of the subnational state in the federal climate politics. In response to this gap, this chapter undertook a microanalysis of Uttar Pradesh’s State Action Plan on Climate Change (SAPCC), primarily on techno-institutional, sociopolitical and financial aspects. In addition, the chapter also explores conceivable drivers of the state initiative or what limits states from being the “laboratories of experiment.” This chapter submits that the U.P.’s state plan, which is prima facie an iterative reflection of its parent document NAPCC, broadly position its climate efforts within the ambit of the developmental paradigm. While institutional mainstreaming of environmental concerns in the state’s development planning is important, the amalgamation of the two divergent yet occasionally overlapping policy issues creates a myth. Development is not essentially adaptation, as it may not be concerned with building the resilience of the community. Further, vulnerability assessment in Uttar Pradesh misses the micro detailing, making it averse to the injection of traditional know-how. This reduces the scope of climate efforts to procedurally deal in with the socioeconomic deficit and advance for economic growth. The shortcoming, however, as this study suggests, can be overcome by the identification of “additionality” of climate change.
