Approaches to low carbon development in China and India

Low carbon development has gained policy prominence and is a concern of both environment and development policy globally and in China and India. This paper discusses the role of China and India as important global actors in light of development imperatives in the two countries. The article then looks at emerging approaches in the two countries related to financing, science, technology & innovation policy, and sub-national actions. The objective is to review efforts in China and India for contributing to learning experiences for other countries. The final section discussed the ways forward in terms of examining the role of China and India in terms of national policy strengthening as well as in global agenda setting. Implementation of sub-national initiatives in both countries faces challenges due to lack of adequate financing as well as knowledge such as greenhouse gas inventories and disaggregated resource and socio-economic assessments. Both India and China are making efforts in technology and innovation domains to set foot on a trajectory of low carbon development with varying degrees of success. In finance, both China and India have experimented with various instruments—the key difference is that China has taken the support of regulation more while India has leaned on to market based instruments. Both China and India are moving on an encouraging track regarding low carbon development with fairly well-designed domestic policies and consistent international engagement.