Abstract
Judicial orders, management plans, and zonation maps prepared in relation to environmental laws encode the jurisprudence on accountability. Laws such as India’s Coastal Regulation Zone Notification (CRZ Notification) 2019 serve as sources of discourse on use and access rights. Such laws are crucial in shaping developmental decisions and democratic practice along the coast. As an environmental law that contains detailed articulation on judicially mandated planning, mapping, and public access to regulatory information, the CRZ Notification 2019 offers a good case to understand the relation between legal discourse and citizens’ agency. Citizens of the state of Tamil Nadu representing its small-scale fishing (SSF) communities have engaged with coastal regulatory jurisprudence by harnessing select dialogic utterances, both in text and in case law, towards specific outcomes of social-ecological governance. We examine official documents, secondary records, environmental practices, and ethnographic accounts pertaining to CRZ mapping in Tamil Nadu to critically interrogate the conditions whereby formal discourse and practice have produced social accountability over coastal commons. This paper concludes that the outcomes of the interplay between the doctrinal utterance on social accountability and its pragmatic practice depends on citizens’ capabilities to leverage diverse institutions and practices of horizontal accountability in struggles over transparency in environmental governance.
Recommended Citation
Udayashankar, Nayana and Sridhar, Aarthi
(2025)
"Between Utterance and Action: The Shaping of Social Accountability in India’s Coastal Commons,"
Journal of Law and Public Policy: Vol. 9:
Iss.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://repository.nls.ac.in/jlpp/vol9/iss1/7