Driving Climate Accountability

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The...

min read

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The recent two-day international summit on ‘The Future of Environment and Climate Dynamics’ inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hosted by the National Green Tribunal in New Delhi, brought together jurists from 17 nations to explore this expanding role of the judiciary in climate governance. The Delhi summit underscored that courts and specialized tribunals are no longer mere arbiters of dispute but have become active, institutional drivers of climate accountability, translating abstract ecological commitments into enforceable, day-to-day legal remedies. Judicial Environmentalism This phenomenon of judicial environmentalism is understood as a structural response to a longstanding deficiency in execution. Although developing nations are generally at the forefront of establishing ambitious statutory goals, from renewable energy development to forest preservation, the bureaucratic apparatus that is responsible for enforcing these goals has usually faltered in the face of political compromises and enforcement difficulties. Several specialized institutions, like the National Green Tribunal in India, were specifically established to fill this gap. By combining judicial expertise with technical assessment, tribunals have created a forum where regulatory inertia can be challenged directly by citizens, local communities, and non-governmental entities. The gathering of jurists from 17 developing and emerging nations indicates that this is not an isolated experiment, but a developing trend in the Global South, where the judiciary is taking the initiative for transforming legislative goals into tangible ecological protection. Fundamental principles like the public trust doctrine, intergenerational equity, and the polluter pays principle are at the base of this judicial transformation. In the past, these ideas were merely present in the introductory part of legislative texts or in international declarations. However, in recent times, courts began to convert abstract legal concepts into practical solutions. The use of the public trust doctrine helps courts remove full power from governments regarding the reclassification of sensitive areas like wetlands and forests for industrial purposes. The evolution of the principle of intergenerational equity means that courts gain the right to examine whether certain industrial activities will have negative consequences for future generations. Moreover, this operational jurisprudence has drastically changed the mechanisms of climate finance and corporate accountability from its original form. In various jurisdictions across the Global South, specialized environmental courts have ceased conducting the standard practice of issuing cease-and-desist orders. Instead, these courts have begun creating compensation schemes whereby polluters have to pay for damage done to the environment for a specified amount, and these funds are devoted to local ecosystem restoration projects. By linking monetary liability, which has to be paid by polluters, to ecological restoration, courts make sure that polluters bear financial responsibility that prevents them from causing damaging actions. This judicial practice has made sovereign states and state agencies accountable for their failure to enforce the law, creating an obligation to control different processes in an open manner and in a constant manner. A Regional Engine The collaborative dynamics highlighted during the summit point toward the creation of a cross-border judicial framework across the Global South. Problems arising from the deterioration of trans-border river basins, air pollution, and exposure to vulnerable coastal areas disregard borders. At the same time, negotiations related to functioning in these shared spaces are full of political and diplomatic problems. However, judicial systems, similar in terms of principles of law and constitution, provide an unconventionally effective way of aligning institutions. Hence, judges share their protocols, processes, and interpretations of laws and thereby lay the foundations of a distinctive jurisprudence aimed at the conditions of the Global South. This framework is particularly significant in balancing rapid economic development with environmental conservation. According to the proceedings, countries of the Global South face the challenge of addressing poverty and the disproportionately negative effects of climate change, which is largely attributed to historical industrialization in other places. By incorporating the principle of the right to a clean environment as part of their constitutional and human rights, judicial institutions aim to ensure that economic growth does not come at the cost of ecology and those suffering in society. The involvement of international judges in the proceedings demonstrates the growing recognition of judicial enforcement as an important tool of justice and accountability, which should be applied to both national governments and international obligations. Ultimately, the proceedings hosted by the National Green Tribunal demonstrate that judicial environmentalism has evolved from a reactive mechanism into a proactive, institutionalized engine of climate governance. As executive machinery continues to navigate competing electoral priorities and political constraints, the responsibility of maintaining the delicate balance between human development and planetary preservation increasingly rests upon the strength of the courtroom. By enforcing strict administrative accountability, defining clear technical parameters for regulatory compliance, and asserting the primacy of ecological constitutionalism, specialized tribunals across the Global South are establishing a transformative paradigm where judicial oversight bridges institutional gaps, ensures long-term regulatory integrity, and guarantees that the rule of law serves as the ultimate safeguard for present and future generations. (The writer is a columnist and policy researcher with a focus on South Asian geopolitics, India’s foreign policy, and the Indo-Pacific. Views personal.)

Homoeopathy, As We Know It

Subhash Kaushik and Kishore Paknikar

Aug 6

4 min read

When NASA searches for life beyond Earth, it speaks of searching for “life, as we know it.” Those five words capture one of the most important principles of science. If life exists elsewhere in the universe, it may not resemble the life we know on Earth. Scientists therefore do not search for the unknown using yesterday’s assumptions. They search with better instruments, better questions, and an open mind.

The same principle has guided every major scientific breakthrough. Every generation mistakes the limits of its instruments for the limits of nature. Microorganisms influenced human life long before the microscope revealed them. Most stomach ulcers were blamed on stress until the discovery of Helicobacter pylori changed medicine forever.

Casting Aspersions

The same lesson applies to homoeopathy. For more than two centuries, homoeopathy has occupied a unique place in medicine. It has been practised across the world, integrated into healthcare systems in many countries and trusted by millions of patients. At the same time, it has remained one of the most debated systems of medicine. Critics have questioned not merely whether it works, but whether it could work at all.

Most medical debates begin after a treatment has shown some benefit. Homoeopathy has often been judged before the scientific discussion could move beyond its proposed mechanism. Homoeopathic medicines are diluted to such an extent that little or none of the original substance is expected to remain. If almost nothing remains, how can anything produce a biological effect? Judged by the chemistry and analytical methods available during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, that conclusion appeared entirely reasonable.

Science, however, does not stand still. Its greatest strength is not certainty but self-correction. New instruments often compel scientists to revisit old conclusions. Advances in nanoscience, materials science and analytical chemistry now allow researchers to examine highly diluted preparations in ways that earlier generations simply could not. Research from India and other countries has reported observations, including measurable physicochemical features in some highly diluted preparations, that have reopened scientific discussion. Not every finding has been independently reproduced, and many questions remain unanswered. Yet one conclusion is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss. The scientific basis for rejecting homoeopathy without further investigation is no longer as strong as it once appeared.

Changing Perceptions

Yesterday’s science asked whether homoeopathy was possible. Today’s science is increasingly asking how highly diluted preparations should be investigated using the best tools available.

The placebo argument deserves similar attention. Critics frequently argue that any benefit observed with homoeopathy is simply the placebo effect. There is no doubt that placebo is real. Confidence in a physician, expectation of recovery, and the body’s own healing mechanisms influence outcomes in every branch of medicine. More than two centuries ago, physicians recognized that nature itself plays a powerful role in healing. That observation applies not only to homoeopathy but to every therapeutic system, including modern medicine.

Homoeopathy has been reported to produce responses not only in adults but also in infants, animals and even plants, where expectation and belief cannot readily account for the observations. These reports do not, by themselves, prove the effectiveness of homoeopathy. Scientific conclusions require rigorous, reproducible and independently verified evidence. They do, however, raise a legitimate scientific question. If placebo cannot adequately explain every reported observation, what does? The answer cannot come from opinion. It can come only from careful scientific investigation.

This is precisely how science has always progressed. It does not reject difficult questions because they challenge accepted thinking. Nor does it accept extraordinary claims without evidence. It designs better experiments.

India is uniquely positioned to lead this next phase of inquiry. It possesses one of the world’s largest networks of qualified homoeopathic physicians, teaching institutions, hospitals and patients. Equally important, it has created a dedicated research ecosystem through the Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), the apex research organisation under the Ministry of Ayush, Government of India. Its mandate is neither to defend tradition nor to promote belief. Its responsibility is to generate credible evidence through laboratory research, well-designed clinical studies, public health investigations and collaborations with leading scientific institutions.

The history of science repeatedly reminds us that ideas are not accepted because they are popular, nor rejected because they are unconventional. They are judged by evidence. Homoeopathy should be no exception. It should neither receive special privilege nor face special prejudice. It should be subjected to exactly the same standards expected of every other branch of medicine.

That is the spirit in which this article has been written. One of us comes from a lifetime devoted to homoeopathic research, education and patient care. The other has spent decades in mainstream scientific research, institution building and promoting scientific temper. We share neither blind faith nor blind scepticism but a commitment to the scientific method.

The larger lesson extends far beyond homoeopathy. Scientific progress depends on a willingness to revisit yesterday’s conclusions when today’s evidence demands it. Every generation mistakes the limits of its instruments for the limits of nature. The history of discovery is, in many ways, the history of overcoming those limits.

Homoeopathy may ultimately confirm some long-held beliefs. It may equally challenge others. Science must remain prepared for either possibility. What it cannot afford is to stop asking questions simply because the answers appear inconvenient.

Research does not exist to protect ideas. It exists to test them. Homoeopathy has earned that test. It deserves to be judged by the best evidence that twenty-first century science can generate, not by the limitations of nineteenth-century knowledge.

(Dr. Kaushik is the Director General, Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), Ministry of Ayush, New Delhi; Dr. Paknikar is the Member, Scientific Advisory Board, CCRH, N. Delhi and ANRF Prime Minister Professor, COEP Technological University, Pune. Views personal.)

Driving Climate Accountability

Homoeopathy, As We Know It

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