Archives: Journal Articles

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a global public health challenge. It has been examined through various angles, but the link between AMR and access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) or lack thereof has received little attention. Both AMR and WASH relate directly to the realization of the rights to health, water, and sanitation. In addition, both can affect the enjoyment of the right to environment. AMR is particularly complex from a rights perspective. Access to medicines contributes significantly to the realization of the right to health. At the same time, AMR affects the poorer sections of society who have disproportionately less access to medicines and to WASH. Rights, equality and justice should thus be at the centre of the development and implementation of law and policy concerning AMR and WASH. As we celebrate 50 years of international environmental law, it is crucial to ask some hard questions concerning the inter-sectional and cross-sectoral dimensions of AMR and WASH from the point of view of rights, equality, and justice. Linking the two would bring various co-benefits that the prevailing silo mentality has prevented.

The water sector in India and vested interests in it have always been averse to change. We have now reached a point where diffi cult decisions must be taken if we are to avoid an increasing number of water-related confl icts. The states must not only adopt legislation based on the central government’s groundwater model law but also make sure to adapt it to their local circumstances. The union government also has a framework legislation that attempts to highlight the importance of water, which all states would do well to replicate.

The development model emphasizing economic growth has been at the root of today’s environmental crises. Its reshaping as ‘sustainable’ development was supposed to address its shortcomings while giving particular attention to the needs of the poor. This has largely failed and in the process inequalities have increased significantly. Inequalities between people need to be addressed through eco-human rights that are collective and multi-level to better reflect today’s environmental challenges. These rights build on the idea of solidarity rights, are framed around the principle of subsidiarity and the need for accountability beyond a single State. Inter-State inequality has been addressed in part through differential treatment in environmental law. It needs to be reconfirmed to address ongoing inequalities and increased resistance to such measures; needs to be more flexible to reflect the specific situation of smaller groups of countries; and needs to integrate elements of intra-State inequality.

The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of “shock mobility” as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments’ reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran’s borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks’ dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work.

The signals that the Agnipath scheme sends to India’s adversaries is that under the current dispensation India is unable to provide for the armed forces what the country needs to meet its strategic aims.

Local government partnerships for producing services are ubiquitous in many countries. However, the approach has rarely been applied in India—likely owing to a history of centralized planning and independent urban and rural governance systems. Nonetheless, the country’s transforming sanitation landscape could benefit from intergovernmental partnerships for scaling services with speed and efficiency. The ongoing national sanitation program has espoused the approach in theory but the body of practice to support its wide deployment is sparse. This paper critically reviews one of the first experiments with the approach for producing sanitation services in the Dhenkanal district, Odisha, India. We ask the question: what can Dhenkanal’s case tell us about the challenges and opportunities for delivering sanitation services through local-level intergovernmental urban–rural partnerships in India? As part of our practice research, we supported the district government pilot the approach. The data, consultations, and observations underpinning the experiment form the basis of our insights. We find that the urban–rural partnership increased access to sanitation services among rural households within a short period, lowered service charges, and clarified institutional responsibilities. The experiment highlighted issues relating to planning, responsibility, accountability, and financing that need tackling in order to strengthen the model going forward. We recommend that evolving a definitive model(s) of intergovernmental partnerships would require experimenting with the approach in diverse institutional contexts and granting governments the flexibility to recreate and renegotiate the form of the partnership.

While metropolitan cities are framed as emancipatory spaces for women migrants, we know less about their experiences in smaller cities, which are driving urban transformation in India. Drawing on pre-pandemic fieldwork with employed youth (aged 15–29 years) in Mangalore and Kishangarh, this article investigates young women’s work, education, aspirations and mobilities in smaller cities which have relatively weak scalar positions in terms of global economic, political and social power. This article finds that small cities act as regional action spaces for women from villages and small towns to capitalise on fleeting opportunities and push against patriarchal boundaries through mobilities. It shows how women use a range of strategies from individual power tactics within households to leveraging institutional support systems to do so. The article suggests that situating migrant-friendly policy initiatives in small cities can potentially improve employment and mobility outcomes for young women.