Democracy, Sustainable Development, and Peace: New Perspectives on South Asia

This book examines in the context of South Asia, four inter related dimensions that constitute the central policy challenges of our time: consolidating democracy, confronting violent extremism, overcoming mass poverty, and addressing the challenge of climate change. These dimensions are explored at the country-specific as well as the regional level, by some of the leading scholars and eminent public figures from the region, and interconnected by the editors through a new perspective. Consolidating democracy in societies with varying degrees of hierarchical rigidity requires governments to give space to civil society and provide institutional access to the under-privileged strata of society over governance decisions that affect their life. Such empowerment requires rapid poverty reduction through inclusive growth and creation of high wage employment. Apart from currently exclusive institutional structures in the economies of South Asia, a major hurdle in achieving inclusive growth is climate change, which has a relatively greater adverse effect on the poor. Mitigation and adaptation measures in the face of climate change require regional cooperation in South Asia for joint water shed management, improved efficiency of irrigation and water use, development of heat-resistant varieties of food grains, and developing decentralized food stock silos to give quick access over food grain to the people in case of severe shortages. This requires cooperation and coordinated policy efforts among South Asian countries. The editors advocate that a prerequisite for such efforts is a new approach based on inter-state peace and cooperation that could facilitate the establishment within individual nation states of institutional links between democratic structures, development initiatives, managing violence and conserving the environment. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780198092346/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Ramgopal Agarwala is Distinguished Fellow at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS); Imtiaz Ahmed is Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Khaled Ahmed is Consulting Editor at Newsweek, Pakistan.; Imran Ali is currently Professor of Business Policy at the Karachi School for Business and Leadership.; Anisuzzaman and is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Dhaka; Ela R. Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women's Association; Ajay Chhibber is UN Assistant Secretary-General and Assistant Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and heads its program for Asia and the Pacific; Biswajit Dhar is Director-General, Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS); Muchkund Dubey is President of Council for Social Development, New Delhi; Kamal Hossain - BCL, D Phil, Oxford University and Bar-at-Law, Lincolns Inn. First Law Minister of an independent Bangladesh where he drafted the Bangladesh Constitution. Subsequently he served as Foreign Minister of Bangladesh; Akmal Hussain is distinguished Professor of Economics at Forman Christian College, Lahore; Rounaq Jahan is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue, Bangladesh; Subhash C. Kashyap is Honorary Research Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, Advocate Supreme Court of India and Consultant in Constitutional Law, Political Management and Parliamentary Affairs; Saman Kelegama is the Executive Director of the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka and was the President of the Sri Lanka Economic Association (SLEA) during 1999-2003; Nagesh Kumar is Director, UN-ESCAP South and South-West Asia Office, New Delhi and UN-ESCAP Chief Economist; Sumanasiri Liyanage is Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka; Abul Maal A Muhith is honourable Finance Minister of Bangaldesh; Mohamed Nasheed is the former President of Republic of Maldives; Deepak Nayyar is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York.; T.K Oommen is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems in the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.; R.K Pachauri is the Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), He is also Director General of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute); Thangavel Palanivel is Chief Economist for Asia and the Pacific, Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New York; Hasan Askari Rizvi is Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Punjab University, Lahore and an Independent Political Consultant; Shyam Saran is Chancellor of the Garhwal Central University, Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board under the National Security Council. He serves as Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries, is Senior Fellow with the Centre for Policy Research, and is Co-Chair on the Indian side on the India-Asean Eminent Persons' Group; Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu is Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) an independent and non-partisan public policy institute focusing on issues of democratic governance, human rights and peace through programmes of research and advocacy; Binayak Sen is currently a Research Director at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS); Ali Tauqeer Sheikh is Director, Asia Climate & Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and Chief Executive Officer, LEAD, Pakistan; Rehman Sobhan and is currently Chairman, Centre for Policy Dialogue, Bangladesh; Leena Srivastava is currently the Vice Chancellor of the TERI University in addition to being the Hony. Executive Director (Operations) at TERI, New Delhi; M.S. Swaminathan has been acclaimed by the TIME magazine as one of the twenty most influential Asians of the 20th century and one of the only three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. He has been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as "the Father of Economic Ecology"; Muhammad Suheyl Umar is adjunct faculty member at the National University of Computers and Emerging Sciences, Lahore and the Lahore University of Management Sciences; Fatma Gul Unal is presently a researcher for UN Women, Policy Division at Headquarters in New York; Kapila Vatsyayan has been Secretary, Ministry of Education; Founder Academic Director, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts; President, India International Centre; Member, UNESCO Executive Board and a nominated Member of the Indian Parliament (Rajya Sabha); Muhammad Yunus is Chairman of Yunus Centre and Founder of Grameen Bank, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is co-receipient of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize along with the Grameen Bank.