Environmental Politics at the Local: Natural Resource Governance in India was launched in New Delhi on 30 August. The panel discussion for the event (L - R) Pankaj Kumar Jha, Assistant Professor, Motilal Nehru College, DU; Pampa Mukherjee, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, Panjab University; Satyajit Singh, Professor, Department of Political Science and Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; Mukul Sharma, Professor of Environmental Science, Ashoka University; Ajit Menon, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies; Amrit Z. Negi, Guest Faculty, Zakir Husain College, DU; and Avantika Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, DU.

An engaged audience listens in as Mukul Sharma opens the panel discussion. 

Volume editor, Satyajit Singh, offers insights on the ideas and methods at the heart of the book.

Ajit Menon, volume editor, brings in conceptual mores that anchor the book’s framing of decentralisation policy and the environment.

Pampa Mukherjee discusses the appropriation of common lands by the upper castes in Punjab and the forms of resistance and collective farming among the Dalits.

Avantika Singh talks about her fieldwork in Jalaun, UP, and the questions it threw up about food insecurity and local collective action.

Amrit Z. Negi analyses the role of local religious tradition in resistance to a hydropower project in Kinnaur.

Pankaj Kumar Jha highlights the disjunct between local communities’ understanding of ‘living with floods’ in Bihar and the statist view of floods as a disaster.