The biggest predictor of candidates in India who support sustainable policies is if they are from a marginalized community, a study indicates
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By Bipasha Maity / NEW DELHI
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India’s environment is deteriorating fast. From worsening air pollution in major cities to intensifying heat waves, water scarcity and recurring floods, climate stress is no longer an abstract scenario or distant threat; it is happening now, every day. However, India is a fast-growing economy and its government is committed to ensuring that it remains one, by investing in infrastructure expansion, mining and urban development. With such projects often facing resistance from local communities, how to reconcile economic ambition with environmental sustainability is an urgent question.
In developing countries such as India, women and children bear a disproportionate share of the costs of environmental shocks, owing to their roles in household management, water and fuel collection and caregiving. This might explain why Indian women have played a prominent role in forest protection and environmental conservation since independence. For example, rural women spearheaded the Chipko movement, which sought to protect their livelihoods from government-backed commercial deforestation in the 1970s.
This tendency remains apparent today. The 2022 World Values Survey showed that Indian women were more likely than men to support protecting the environment, even at the cost of economic growth. These findings fit into a broader global pattern, with evidence from advanced economies and cross-country studies showing that women tend to be more concerned about environmental protection than men are.
Illustration: Yusha
What is less clear is whether women who are elected to public office show a similar level of commitment to environmental protection. Women politicians in India tend to be particularly responsive to their female constituents, influencing the provision of public goods such as drinking water and roads. New research shows that, when it comes to environmental conservation, the picture is more complicated.
Using granular satellite data on forest cover, a study sought to understand whether electing women to state legislatures leads to improvements in their constituencies and whether any gains persist throughout their electoral terms. Forest-cover growth serves as a useful proxy for conservation, because forests are important carbon sinks, central to biodiversity preservation and deeply intertwined with rural livelihoods and indigenous rights. This explains why they have become increasingly prominent in multilateral climate negotiations, including last year’s UN Climate Change Conference.
The authors of the study chose to focus on state-level legislators, because while forests formally fall under the concurrent jurisdiction of India’s national and state governments, state governments play a key role in forest governance through legislation, implementation and oversight. Members of state legislatures, who are elected every five years under a first-past-the-post system, are often more closely connected to local environmental concerns than national legislators are. They can influence conservation outcomes by allocating local development funds to environmental projects, hold state ministries accountable for implementing such projects and advocate for sustainable development within their constituencies.
The study found that, on average, the change in forest cover in the year immediately following an election was not significantly different in constituencies represented by women than in those represented by men. When another factor is considered — whether the constituency is among those reserved for candidates from historically marginalized communities, such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs) — a striking pattern emerges.
Constituencies that are both SC/ST-reserved and represented by women account for almost all of the meaningful increases in annual forest-cover growth. Moreover, while forest-cover growth tends to rise over the course of a female legislator’s term, these gains are driven primarily by women elected from reserved constituencies.
One plausible explanation for these findings is that women politicians from historically underrepresented communities are particularly attuned to the unequal costs that environmental degradation and climate-related shocks impose on women and children, as well as to the limited capacity of marginalized populations to adapt. This interpretation is consistent with earlier research showing that legislators’ overlapping social identities often shape policy priorities and public-goods provision in India.
India has been working to increase women’s political representation, including through a constitutional amendment reserving 33 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament, state assemblies and Delhi Legislative Assembly for women. This is a welcome effort, which might help to advance sustainable development.
The lesson could not be clearer: progress becomes far more likely when the women in power are representing communities that are environmentally vulnerable and historically excluded from power.
The implications extend well beyond India. In large, multiracial and ethnically diverse democracies — such as Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa — climate policy is increasingly shaped by subnational politics, where decisions about land use, forests and natural resources directly affect marginalized populations. Electing more women might be a step in the right direction, but how many women hold office matters less than which women do — and who they represent.
Bipasha Maity is assistant professor of Economics at Ashoka University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate www.project-syndicate.org
