Dr Bharath Sundaram, Associate Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS, and Dhriti Hariharan and Shloka Uchil, SIAS alum, have co-authored an article titled Lost in translation: Disconnected law-policy-governance frameworks negatively influence forest valuation in India, published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics.
Formulating forest valuation policy in nations of the Global South is challenging. Valuation policies strive to balance a complex set of factors such as determining incentive structure within resource-hungry political economies, accurately estimating material value, deciding how to account for non-material and intrinsic value, precautionary pegging of discount rates to account for future climate change and carbon sequestration value, balancing lost opportunity costs of present-day forest dwellers with notional future benefits from forests accruing to future citizens, and establishing a viable funding pipeline for afforestation and restoration efforts.
In this paper, the team analyses the historical policy landscape, valuation methodology, embedded normative values, and the role played by judicial activism underlying the valuation of forests in India.
