ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we analyse changes to environmental governance and policy under Narendra Modi’s authoritarian populist regime, a regime which prioritizes economic growth over other possible goals in the political economy, while simultaneously adopting a repressive approach towards dissenters. This, we argue, has registered as an autocratic turn in environmental governance, with detrimental consequences for the bio-physical environment, and for marginalized tribal and local communities whose rights have been greatly eroded, and whose access to deliberative and consultative spaces has narrowed. We substantiate this argument by analysing two specific domains of environmental governance, namely forests and land.
