Greening law: A socio-legal analysis of environmental human rights in India

In this dissertation, I examine how India has addressed the question of environmental human rights in the context of three green issues on water rights, forest conservation and air pollution. The dominant disciplinary frameworks on environmental human rights focus on effective compliance with international norms in domestic legal order. They see the internalization of human rights through the adaptation of a set of parallel global standards. Law and Society scholarship argues that acceptance of uniform application of rights masks the interrelationship between international human rights law and local normative orders. I study the process through which environmental human rights claims are incorporated in domestic legal cultures. Taking a socio-legal approach to the historical development of environmental rights in India, I offer some insights about the nature of legal pluralism in a postcolonial context.;In this study I demonstrate that acceptance of cosmopolitan environmental standards in India is built through a plural framework of law that incorporates international environmental norms, constitutional principles and local customary practices. It is based on the interplay between different kinds of laws and also social and cultural assumptions about the proper relationship between individuals, groups, and the natural world. This, I argue, has been facilitated by the public interest litigation movement in the judicial process which introduced two important changes in the law- (1) it enhanced social and legal interaction by enabling social actors to approach the court and (2) liberal interpretation of rights. This marks a significant departure from colonial common law assumptions about the law and peoples' relationship with nature. I conclude that the adoption of a plural legal approach facilitated by public interest litigation has led to the internalization of cosmopolitan environmental jurisprudence in India. My aim is to provide through case studies an understanding of how human perceptions of relationship with the natural world influence the socio-legal framing of environment. My study demonstrates concretely the ways in which local social factors affect the acceptance of global norm.