Kartikeya Singh: Bureaucracies for the Better
In January 2022, Issues in Science & Technology published Kartikeya Singh's latest article focused on how we can design government institutions to accelerate our transition to the establishment of a new climate-aligned and resilient global economy. He writes that to continue to lift its population out of poverty, India should give its energy ministries a new mandate—moving the country away from coal and toward a more sustainable economy.
“As we look forward to achieving the goals of COP26—and all the COPs after that—we would do well to remember that there is a difference between making mandates, objectives, fuels, and technologies obsolescent and making the people and institutions associated with them obsolescent. There’s a modern tendency to see bureaucracies as obstacles, as plodding second cousins to entrepreneurialism, but their very persistence speaks to the power of people organized around common goals—whether that’s running pipelines, mining coal, or cleaning up pollution. And although much of the rhetoric around addressing climate emissions has focused on things we don’t have—technology, money, time—the people who can make it happen are already here.”
