Political Economy of Climate, Trade and Solar Energy in India

Abstract

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (NSM) is one of India’s flagships programs to drive efforts on climate change mitigation and has been the subject of a long-standing trade dispute with the United States (US) at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The dispute arose over India’s use of local content requirements (LCRs) – a policy measure that typically mandates a certain percentage of goods used in the production process to be sourced locally – within the NSM. In the backdrop of India’s target to increase solar power capacity to 100 gigawatts (GW) by 2022, this paper presents a socio-legal perspective on whether and how dispute settlement in the WTO impacts India’s ambitious solar energy goals. Relying on the literature on fragmentation in international law and international political economy of energy, this paper applies a political economy lens on the solar trade dispute between India and explores: the political economy of LCRs within India’s solar policy; the main drivers and underlying politics of the solar trade dispute between India and the US; and the effect of the WTO ruling on regulatory governance of solar energy in India. To do this, the paper relies on a two-pronged qualitative research approach: first, a series of several semi-structured interviews with Indian public officials and relevant stakeholders; and second, an in-depth media discourse analysis of the coverage on the solar trade dispute in leading Indian news outlets with a view to supplement the normative claims emerging from the qualitative interview data.