Climate Action Plans forget that their cities are people, not buildings and vehicles

When Mumbai launched its Climate Action Plan in 2022, it made headlines for the ambitious nature of its policies, which ranged from electric vehicles to renewable energy grids. Its technology-driven plan was praised as representing a modern, tech-savvy India. However, a closer look reveals that the plan made one notable omission: the people of Mumbai.

A fundamental limitation in Mumbai’s CAP is its technocratic, top-down approach, with plan formulation outsourced to consultants without adequate consultation with stakeholders and minimal participation from citizens. Chennai, Delhi, and the (few) other Indian cities with such plans are no exception to this. India may have signed the Paris Agreement and launched the Smart Cities Mission and the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) framework, but how sustainable are any of these policies if they are not connected to the ground, especially in terms of citizen consultation and inputs? And how can Indian cities address this?

What is a Climate Action Plan?

Climate Action Plans (CAPs) are strategic blueprints that outline how cities,  states and countries intend to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate-related risks. These typically include sectoral targets for transport, energy, waste, water, land use, and building design, often aligned with broader national or international commitments like the Paris Agreement. In principle, CAPs should be participatory, locally informed, and inclusive.

India currently has 41 cities with climate action plans, spanning metros like Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi to medium and smaller cities like Surat, Kochi, and Siliguri. Regionally, these cities are spread across the North (Delhi, Amritsar), South (Chennai, Bengaluru, Kochi), East (Kolkata, Bhubaneswar), West (Mumbai, Surat, Ahmedabad), and Northeast (Guwahati, Aizawl), indicating at least nominal national coverage. However, the plans exhibit a worrying commonality – most are designed through consultant-led processes, with little organic engagement from municipal communities, elected representatives, or marginalised and vulnerable residents.

What’s happening in India?

Marginalised communities, who are often the most exposed to climate impacts, seldom receive attention in these plans, both as subjects and as stakeholders. For instance, Siliguri’s plan uses the phrase “socially-equitable urbanisation” just once, while Surat vaguely acknowledges the existence of “vulnerable groups”, with the extent of its proposed action being community workshops.

Chennai’s CAP identifies slums in high-flood risk zones, sets targets for 100% access to resilient housing and basic services by 2050, and proposes credit support for energy-efficient appliances for low-income households. On paper, it appears progressive. Yet, the plan broadly refers to “stakeholder consultations” without clarifying which stakeholders were consulted and the procedural modalities of such consultations. The plan also does not specifically mention whether the aforementioned consultations involved marginalised communities in particular.

While a few cities like Kochi, Bhubaneswar, and Surat have initiated community workshops or have used slum vulnerability data in disaster planning, these efforts are rarely systemic and often donor-driven. The Tamil Nadu Climate Fellowship Programme is a rare state-level innovation to involve youth in climate governance, but such initiatives still fall short of truly decentralised, city-owned planning.

These CAPs also falter on reliability, transparency and access. Many city websites crash, updates are sporadic, and documentation is either overly technical or incomplete. As a result, even basic public access is limited, which undermines the very idea of participatory governance. Without true public engagement, well-meaning climate policies can backfire when they are operationalised. Green infrastructure could lead to gentrification, displacing vulnerable communities and cutting off their access to livelihoods.

A comparison with the US

The fundamental limitations in Indian plans can be better understood in comparison with the United States. While the U.S. plans are not universally equitable, the institutional culture of localised planning is stronger than in India. An objective and honest comparison helps to expose the structural limitations in India’s approach.

The USA has no national framework - instead, its state governments have guiding principles and city governments take most of the initiative in formulating plans. (As of 2019, 177 US American cities had CAPs). In India, there is a national framework (NAPCC), and city plans are a collaboration between state governments, city governments, and private consultancies like GIZ and C40 Cities. The participation of private consultancies and the state government is a significant difference in India.

The cities of Ann Arbor and Durham mandate citizen steering committees, and the latter heavily emphasises the role of communities (see image). Boulder’s government has overseen the creation of a community solar garden, catering towards its low-income population. They also have a climate equity framework to guide all of the other policies to ensure socio-economic and environmental justice, as well as a carbon tax.

The bigger cities also appear to address community needs. Houston has the Justice40 Initiative to ensure that 40% of all climate investment is pumped towards the historically marginalised. Los Angeles has concrete measures in place to prevent ‘green gentrification’ (i.e., the displacement of settlements to accommodate development in the name of environmental preservation - for example, the construction of a metro line that displaces the urban poor and their livelihoods).

The way forward

Even a cursory comparison of the CAPs of the two countries shows that Indian cities have technocratic plans that do not touch upon substantive issues and fail to aim for transformational changes. A major structural reason for this is that urban local bodies (ULBs) in India lack both the fiscal autonomy and human resource capacity to independently lead robust climate planning. Additionally, there is a need to strengthen urban local bodies and their governance nationwide to make stakeholder consultations truly meaningful.

Climate action plans need to have a greater focus on ground-level stakeholder engagement and citizen participation in shaping the principles and specifics of climate planning and policy. However, there can be some general changes made to the approaches to planning, such as transparency in funding, improved public communication, and ward-level decision-making. There also needs to be a candid review of why these plans require so much intervention from state governments and private agencies – a separate question about the nature of the Indian federalism and urban local governance.

Authors: Sruti Samhita Malladi, Undergraduate Student, FLAME University; Prof. Chaitanya Ravi, Faculty of Public Policy, FLAME University; and Prof. Anup Tripathi, Faculty of Sociology, FLAME University.