Climate governance without climate discourse: Evidence from three decades of legislative questions in India

Multi-level governance (MLG) emphasises the importance of subnational institutions and actors in climate governance. From an MLG perspective, state legislatures and legislators in India represent potentially important but empirically underexamined sites of climate governance, given their roles in articulating local concerns, exercising policy oversight, and holding executive actors accountable. This study provides the first systematic synthesis of climate-related legislative discourse in India by examining over three decades (1993–2025) of legislative questions from the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly. Using a public corpus of 9,522 questions retrieved from the National eVidhan Application (NeVA) portal, the study applies an iteratively developed keyword-based annotation approach to distinguish between explicit climate discourse and implicit climate-relevant engagement. The findings show that explicit references to climate change are exceedingly rare, accounting for 0.06% of all legislative questions, consistent with the limited formal integration of state legislatures within India’s climate governance framework. In contrast, legislators frequently engage with climate-relevant sectors such as coal, flood, forests, and irrigation, framing these issues primarily through administrative and financial concerns rather than through climate change narratives. This pattern highlights the unrealised potential of subnational legislatures as sites of climate governance. By focusing on legislative attention and discourse, this study contributes new empirical evidence on subnational climate governance in the Global South and highlights opportunities for mainstreaming climate-change discourse within legislative processes.