The Distributional Life of Sustainable Development : Environmentalism and Economic Growth in the Supreme Court of India
(2026)- Abstract
- This thesis examines how Sustainable Development has operated in the environmental jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of India as a distributional mechanism – one that allocates environmental costs and developmental benefits along the existing lines of social and economic inequality. Drawing on a distributive analysis of about one hundred cases decided between 1996 and 2024 across five theatres of environmental conflict, namely industrial pollution, forests, infrastructure, urban governance and species protection, I argue that the doctrine's semantic plasticity and its patterned distributional bias are not two separate phenomena but are constituted together within the political economy that followed India's liberalisation in 1991. What... (More)
- This thesis examines how Sustainable Development has operated in the environmental jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of India as a distributional mechanism – one that allocates environmental costs and developmental benefits along the existing lines of social and economic inequality. Drawing on a distributive analysis of about one hundred cases decided between 1996 and 2024 across five theatres of environmental conflict, namely industrial pollution, forests, infrastructure, urban governance and species protection, I argue that the doctrine's semantic plasticity and its patterned distributional bias are not two separate phenomena but are constituted together within the political economy that followed India's liberalisation in 1991. What shifts over the period is not the doctrine itself but which of its forms receives institutional uptake, as an early paradigm of environmental primacy gives way to a framework of balancing and, in time, to the open accommodation of development. Across the theatres, the Court’s balancing systematically privileges the large scale over the small, present benefits over future costs, and the quantifiable over the diffuse, so that the burdens of both pollution and conservation come to rest on adivasis, the urban poor, informal workers and future generations, while the gains accrue to organised capital and the developmental priorities of the state. Operating through the ostensibly neutral vocabulary of balance and proportionality, and shaped by the systematic underenforcement of environmental law, the institutional pressure for growth and the power asymmetries between organised and diffuse interests, Sustainable Development reproduces domestically the very structure of inequality it was internationally conceived to resist. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/8f7a0e8a-4101-47fc-8e26-9ad939309f67
- author
- Menon, Mahesh LU
- supervisor
- opponent
-
- Senior Lecturer Natarajan, Usha, University of the West Indies
- organization
- publishing date
- 2026-08-01
- type
- Thesis
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- Sustainable development, Environmental adjudication, Supreme Court of India, Distributive analysis, Judicialization of environmental politics, Law and political economy, Environmental justice, Proportionality and balancing, Environmental law, Hållbar utveckling, Miljörätt
- pages
- 434 pages
- publisher
- Lund University, Faculty of Law
- defense location
- Pufendorfsalen, Faculty of Law, Lilla Gråbrödersgatan 3 C, Lund
- defense date
- 2026-09-08 10:15:00
- ISBN
- 978-91-90202-17-3
- 978-91-90202-16-6
- project
- The Distributional Life of Sustainable Development
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 8f7a0e8a-4101-47fc-8e26-9ad939309f67
- date added to LUP
- 2026-07-21 23:17:04
- date last changed
- 2026-08-17 12:38:02
@phdthesis{8f7a0e8a-4101-47fc-8e26-9ad939309f67,
abstract = {{This thesis examines how Sustainable Development has operated in the environmental jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of India as a distributional mechanism – one that allocates environmental costs and developmental benefits along the existing lines of social and economic inequality. Drawing on a distributive analysis of about one hundred cases decided between 1996 and 2024 across five theatres of environmental conflict, namely industrial pollution, forests, infrastructure, urban governance and species protection, I argue that the doctrine's semantic plasticity and its patterned distributional bias are not two separate phenomena but are constituted together within the political economy that followed India's liberalisation in 1991. What shifts over the period is not the doctrine itself but which of its forms receives institutional uptake, as an early paradigm of environmental primacy gives way to a framework of balancing and, in time, to the open accommodation of development. Across the theatres, the Court’s balancing systematically privileges the large scale over the small, present benefits over future costs, and the quantifiable over the diffuse, so that the burdens of both pollution and conservation come to rest on adivasis, the urban poor, informal workers and future generations, while the gains accrue to organised capital and the developmental priorities of the state. Operating through the ostensibly neutral vocabulary of balance and proportionality, and shaped by the systematic underenforcement of environmental law, the institutional pressure for growth and the power asymmetries between organised and diffuse interests, Sustainable Development reproduces domestically the very structure of inequality it was internationally conceived to resist.}},
author = {{Menon, Mahesh}},
isbn = {{978-91-90202-17-3}},
keywords = {{Sustainable development; Environmental adjudication; Supreme Court of India; Distributive analysis; Judicialization of environmental politics; Law and political economy; Environmental justice; Proportionality and balancing; Environmental law; Hållbar utveckling; Miljörätt}},
language = {{eng}},
month = {{08}},
publisher = {{Lund University, Faculty of Law}},
school = {{Lund University}},
title = {{The Distributional Life of Sustainable Development : Environmentalism and Economic Growth in the Supreme Court of India}},
year = {{2026}},
}