




































Ecology, Economy, and Society–the INSEE Journal 8(1): 1-4, January 2025 

EDITORIAL  

Diversity, Scale, and Context in Environmental 
Governance 

Sudha Vasan  

As 2025 dawns, we bring you this first issue of volume eight of Ecology, 
Economy and Society – the INSEE journal. Continuing the tradition of 
facilitating interdisciplinary conversations across theory and practice, this 
issue includes contributions in a wide range of formats—from research and 
review essays, to a commentary, book reviews, and insights from the field. 
We anticipate that having multiple formats will allow for the emergence of 
new insights unconstrained by traditional expectations. We hope they 
engage your interest and engender further conversations. 

The rich diversity of social and ecological life in India, which defies 
standardization, uniformity, and fixity, poses challenges for environmental 
governance, policy, and planning, which occur at broad spatial and temporal 
scales. Thus, environmental governance and planning involve some 
categorical simplification of messy realities to make them more legible and 
governable, evocatively described as ‘Seeing like a State’ by James Scott 
(1998). Decentralization in environmental management has emerged as a 
solution in response to this critique of high modern planning. 
Simultaneously, increasing understanding of the linkages between 
temporally and spatially specific actions, and cumulative, planetary, and 
geological changes, has sparked discussions on the need for regional, 
national, and global planning. This dialectic of scales, and in particular, the 
significance of the flows and interactions across scales, is a foundational 
concern of interdisciplinary frameworks such as political ecology. See, for 
instance, Blake and Brookfield (1987), who define one of the objectives of 
the political ecology approach as the bringing together of “the contribution 
of different geographical scales and hierarchies of socioeconomic 

                                                
 Professor, Department of  Sociology, Delhi School of  Economics, University of  Delhi, 
Delhi 110007; svasan@sociology.du.ac.in    

Copyright © Vasan 2025. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v8i1.1585  

mailto:svasan@sociology.du.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v8i1.1585


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [2] 

organizations (eg, person, household, village, region, state, world)” (1987: 
17).   

The essays in this volume highlight the significance of the local context as 
well as ecological and social particularities for effective, efficient, and 
sustainable environmental governance. As Partik Kumar and Veena 
Srinivasan quote in their essay on the depletion of alluvial aquifers, “Policy 
reforms that ignore the local context are doomed to failure” (Polski and 
Ostrom 1999). Applying Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development 
(IAD) framework for the management of common pool resources, they 
discuss why groundwater management approaches that are effective in 
peninsular Indian hard-rock systems may not be suitable in regions with 
alluvial aquifers. They recommend that contextual design, which considers 
diverse resource characteristics, its uses, users, and institutions, is needed to 
inform large-scale efforts alongside systematic support.  

The commentary in this issue contributes to global policy discussions by 
emphasizing the need for contextual interventions. The One Health 
approach has emerged as an important framework that recognizes the 
interconnections between human, non-human, and environmental health. 
Madhuri Ramesh, Sheetal Patil, and Adithya Pradyumna “seek to diversify 
global policy discussions on One Health by presenting (such) a perspective 
from India.” They introduce readers to recent post-pandemic interventions 
in the global One Health discourse (the Environment–Health Nexus Policy 
Guide released by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for 
Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the International Institute for Sustainable 
Development (IISD) in 2022–-23). They propose that successfully 
implementing such integrated frameworks in resource-constrained regions, 
such as the Asia-Pacific, requires a focus on pragmatic goals, the right to 
healthcare, and community participation.   

Continuing this discussion on the influence of local contextual factors on 
broader policy, Nita Shashidharan shares insights from the field and the 
archives on how the agency of actors on the ground (range forest officers) 
influences how land management in protected areas unfolds. Through a 
discussion of the de jure and de facto land management approaches of forest 
officials in the Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve (STR), in Erode, Tamil 
Nadu, she highlights the complexity of and challenges in on-ground 
implementation. 

The valuation of ecosystem services has consistently evolved over the years, 
and it is the subject of contested debates across disciplines. Baral et al. 
present a systematic review of research articles that apply benefit–cost 
analysis (BCA) to community forestry restoration efforts. They find that 



[3] Vasan 

 

transaction costs are often underrepresented, while timber resources and 
carbon sequestration are prioritized in these studies. Evaluation tools such 
as BCA also need context-specific refining for them to be useful. 

Waste management is a major concern in our increasingly consumptive 
urbanizing world, and it is likely to become even more critical. Two 
contributions in this issue tackle the topic—a research essay examining best 
practices for involving private companies in solid waste management, and a 
thematic essay evaluating research on the development of an eco-
technology (constructed wastelands) for wastewater treatment.  Poulomee 
Ghosh et al. discuss best practices in solid waste management under 
initiatives such as the Smart City Mission using case studies of three success 
stories (the Indian cities of Pune, Visakhapatnam, and Tirupati). Varying 
degrees of success are seen in the segregation and composting of wet waste, 
dry waste treatment, and dumpsite remediation, with some lags in the 
remediation of legacy waste.  It is noteworthy that waste producers’ 
willingness to pay for solid-waste management services remains low despite 
the neoliberal transition in India. Malabika Biswas Roy, Shilpa Saha, and 
Pankaj Kumar Roy review the research on constructed wetlands (CWs) that 
mimic natural wetland processes and are designed primarily for wastewater 
treatment. They conclude that this is an effective and cost-efficient 
technology, but local contextual challenges such as land requirements, the 
need for regular maintenance, and public awareness persist. 

Three recent books are reviewed in this issue: Merlyn Maria Antony reviews 
a book by Michael Fabinyi and Kate Barclay, which details the rich fishing 
livelihoods seen in the Asia-Pacific region, providing insights on 
governance and policy-making for waterscapes. Kishore Dhavala reviews a 
synthesis volume of writing spanning diverse themes by two senior Indian 
economists, M. N. Murty and Surender Kumar (Three Pillars: Government, 
Market, and Communities for Environment Management).  The third review by 
Shailesh Kumar and Diptimayee Nayak takes a close look at Peter A. 
Victor’s Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril, which evaluates 
the likelihood of current economic growth models leading to an 
overshooting of planetary resource boundaries.  In keeping with the 
connecting thread of this issue, the three books reviewed use different 
scales of analysis, ranging from a micro livelihoods perspective to analysing 
institutions at different scales to discussing planetary boundaries. We could 
not have planned such a perfect coincidence!  

This collection, we hope, will continue to generate interdisciplinary thinking 
and conversations at the interface of  ecology, economy, society, which is the 
founding objective of  this journal.   



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [4] 

Conflict of  Interest Statement: No potential conflict of  interest was 

reported by the author. 

REFERENCES 

Blaikie, Piers, and Harold Brookfield, eds. 1987. Land Degradation and Society. 
London: Methuen. 

Fabinyi, Michael, and Kate Barclay. 2022. Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods. Cham: 
Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79591-7  

Murty, M. N., and Surender Kumar, eds. 2023. Three Pillars: Government, Market, and 
Communities for Environment Management. Gurgaon: Academic Foundation Press. 

Polski, Margaret M., and Elinor Ostrom. 1999. “An Institutional Framework for 
Policy Analysis and Design.” In Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political 
Economy, edited by Daniel H. Cole and Michael D. McGinnis, Volume 3A, A 
Framework for Policy Analysis, 13-47. London: Lexington Books. 
https://ostromworkshop.indiana.edu/pdf/teaching/iad-for-policy-applications.pdf 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human 
Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press. 

Victor, Peter A. 2023. Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril, UK: New 
Society Publishers. 

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79591-7
https://ostromworkshop.indiana.edu/pdf/teaching/iad-for-policy-applications.pdf

