Abstract
How do developing-country states negotiate the competing pressures of extraction-led development and environmental protection when both imperatives are active simultaneously? This dissertation examines the question through a comparative analysis of the governance of two mineral value chains in India, coal and bauxite, that are governed within the same national institutional framework but subject to fundamentally different configurations of developmental, environmental, and market pressure. Coal is governed through a legacy governance model organized around domestic energy security, public-sector production, and administered pricing; bauxite is governed through a sustainability-aligned governance model organized around global market integration, green-transition framing, and buyer-side certification regimes. Sustainability-aligned, as used throughout, names a mode of governance and a legitimating institutional form rather than an environmental outcome.
The dissertation develops the concept of adaptive governance structures, defined as the institutional arrangements through which developmental states with mineral wealth selectively reorganize regulatory authority, coordination mechanisms, and public-private arrangements across the nodes of a mineral value chain in response to the configuration of pressures that each commodity faces, to explain how one institutional framework produces two distinct governance configurations instead of two parallel regimes. The concept departs from the social-ecological systems literature in which “adaptive governance” originates; the qualifier “structures” designates the institutional form through which adaptation is enacted rather than a normatively valued mode of governing.
The research design operates at two levels of comparison. At the sectoral level, the dissertation compares coal and bauxite as contrasting value chains within a shared institutional regime, tracing governance across four analytical nodes: exploration and licensing, extraction, processing, and transportation. Within each sector, the dissertation compares the governance of one public-sector and one private-sector mining enterprise, examining how ownership structure mediates the pressures transmitted by each chain. The analysis draws on semi-structured expert interviews with government officials, mining company representatives, industry associations, environmental activists, and civil society organizations; extensive document analysis including legislative and policy frameworks, environmental clearance files, Expert Appraisal Committee minutes, parliamentary proceedings, judicial decisions, corporate sustainability reports, and certification documentation; and fieldwork concentrated in Jharkhand and Odisha, two of India’s leading mineral-producing states, and New Delhi.
Three dimensions of divergence, end-use orientation, market orientation, and ownership structure, interact to produce the configuration of pressures that each chain transmits to the shared regulatory apparatus. The central argument is that the Indian state does not choose between development and environment but reconciles them through institutional adjustments that preserve the underlying accumulation logic while reorganizing the surface forms through which that logic operates. The concept of adaptive governance structures is situated at the intersection of global value chain analysis, which the dissertation extends to upstream extractive industries, while restoring the state to the center of value chain governance as simultaneously regulator, producer, facilitator, and buyer; comparative-historical institutionalism, in which the dissertation shows how the same mechanisms of gradual institutional change produce different governance configurations across commodity sectors within a single national regime; and political ecology, in which the dissertation specifies how end-use, market position, and ownership structure constitute a commodity as a particular governance problem rather than through its material properties alone. The limits of decarbonization within existing development logics, the dissertation concludes, are not primarily limits of technology or finance; they are instead limits that are embedded in the institutional arrangements through which the state reconciles competing pressures, arrangements that are specifically designed not to displace the accumulation logic they accommodate.
