Busby Joshua W. and Shidore Sarang

The paper assesses India’s potential for emissions mitigation through a sectoral lens, focusing on eight dominant sectors – namely electricity production, agriculture, road transport, buildings, and four disaggregated industry subsectors (steel, cement, petrochemicals, and fertilizers). It argues that whether emissions mitigation is favorable from a structural perspective is a function of two main factors: (1) political/organizational feasibility and (2) techno-economic feasibility. Political/organizational feasibility in turn is assessed through two additional factors, market concentration and government concentration. Our central intuition is that fragmented markets and/or fragmented government structures pose barriers for collective action. Road transport represents the most favorable sector for emissions mitigation followed by petrochemicals. Cement and fertilizers are already at or near the global efficiency frontier. Three sectors – electricity, agriculture, and steel – represent hard cases on both dimensions of feasibility. Buildings possess strong techno-economic feasibility but challenging political/organizational feasibility.

DOI : 10.1016/j.erss.2016.11.011

Disponible sur : www.sciencedirect.com