Harvard professor discusses environmental regulations

    Rohini Pande, the Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke yesterday to Tufts students and faculty about the process of developing environmental regulations when states lack the capacity and knowledge to create them independently.

    Pande, who has worked extensively on the development of environmental regulatory programs in India, delivered her talk as part of the Birger Lecture Series. Professor of Economics Enrico Spolaore introduced Pande and described her as "an expert on political economy and development."

    "Her research is about the design of institutions and government regulations, and how they affect the policy outcomes and the welfare of citizens, so she has done a lot of work on democracy and gender representation in democratic institutions," Spolaore said. "More recently, her work has focused on environmental regulation."

    Pande began by speaking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2014 report — released only a few days ago — and how it states that there is increased scientific evidence of climate change. According to Pande, climate change will have particularly large impacts on India, which has been slow to develop new technologies and remains a major polluter. She said much of the problem lies with the state's inability to enact changes.

    "The IPCC reports ... very strongly tried to argue that the current dilemma facing India ... has to do with a willingness to implement basic principles of how to tax and what to tax," she said.

    Pande added that there is a major gap between developed countries and those that are still developing, like India, due to a technological and ideological divide.

    "This is also being debated a lot at the international negotiating table, [where] a number of emerging economies and countries say, 'Why should we pay the cost for the fact that the rich countries have reached this point where they can relatively cheaply move away from fossil fuels?'" she said. "If we're going to think about decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases, we're going to think about policies that are both going to be accepted by the developing countries, but that are also going to be able to be implemented."

    Currently, India is unable to either create or enforce environmental regulations, and this is a major obstacle, Pande explained. She suggested that new creative strategies will need to be developed.

    "Successful policy responses in emerging economies requires addressing implementation challenges," she added. "It's going to be hard to achieve [change] under the traditional command and control setup."

    Pande spoke extensively about implementing emissions standards at power plants and discussed the difficulties in ensuring their enforcement. She explained that many of the auditors —the people who are responsible for testing individual power plants — are often entrenched in the industry. Many of them consult for other energy companies, which can compromise their testing. This lack of enforcement contributes to major health concerns in India, she added.

    "Current levels of pollution lead to a reduced life expectancy by three years," Pande said. "India right now is the country with the highest rate of respiratory related deaths, so clearly it's a big issue."

    Pande explained that she has worked extensively with the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, an organization responsible for ensuring that Indian industrial plants comply with pollution standards, to reform their audit and verification system. She said that the Indian courts have been fairly active with regard to environmental issues, and the Gujarat Board was taken to court because people didn't think they were using the pollution data that they were supposed to be collecting.

    Her research resulted in a new, experimental audit system, one in which the auditors were centrally controlled and did not receive their salaries from individual industrial plants. Pande also found that the implementation of continuous emissions monitoring schemes   — mechanisms that would measure emissions every few seconds — would help remove the human element of emissions standards enforcement. She argued that CEMS would provide regulators with better information, and would allow them to develop more accurate policies and rules.

    Overall, Pande argued for the development of international agreements that take into account each party's individual wishes.

    "If you're going to have effective international action on climate change, I think you're not going to just come up with the standards — I think you're going to have to address, at the local level, what those implementation standards are," she said.