The Commons Cell, NLSIU in collaboration with the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), Centre for Policy Research (CPR) is organising a workshop titled ‘The National Green Tribunal as an Institution of Urban Governance’ on August 13th, 2026 from 9 AM to 3:30 PM in the Training Centre Conference Hall, Ground Floor, NLSIU.

About the Workshop

The establishment of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) as a specialised environmental court with judicial and technical expertise marked a watershed moment in the history of environmental adjudication in the country. Over the years, the NGT emerged as a pivotal institution in the country’s environmental governance, responding to the need for scientific, technical, and multidisciplinary expertise to adjudicate environmental disputes.

NGT has increasingly been called upon to decide on a wide range of environmental issues in urban areas. While NGT was not intended as an arbiter of urban questions, there is preliminary evidence that around 1/4th of the NGT’s caseload relates to the urban, including under pollution control laws, waste management, and protection of urban nature. NGT has effectively intervened in several urban issues by enforcing ecological buffer zones, requiring compliance with Solid Waste Management Rules, ensuring environmental compliance for building and infrastructure projects, mandating the protection of urban lakes and wetlands, and so on. Many of these cases originate when urban activists approach the tribunal with urban issues in their cities that have an environmental dimension.

Several issues arise as NGT becomes a critical actor in urban governance. Firstly, the choice of going to the tribunal affects how the dispute is framed. As the mandate of NGT is focused on a specified list of environmental laws, applicants are constrained to limit their contestation within this framework, leaving out other issues. This, then, has implications for how public engagement on the matter gets moulded. Secondly, even as NGT has the power to adjudicate on matters raising ‘substantial question relating to environment’, ‘environment’ is often narrowly construed, overlooking the fact that environmental issues are always intricately linked to the socio-economic and political context in which they emerge. Thirdly, the engagement of environmental law with urban landscapes and stakeholders is not always well established, further narrowing the tribunal’s engagement with the issues at stake. NGT has the power to bring clarity to vague terms and concepts; however, the question is whether the tribunal undertakes such an exercise.

Aims of Stakeholder Discussions in the Workshop

The aim of the workshop is to explore and discuss the experience of urban cases in the NGT, and the effects of environmental law on questions of urban governance, within and as part of a socio-legal reading of the NGT as an institution. Two specific themes for the workshop are:

• The making of an urban contestation into an environmental dispute
• The manner in which NGT establishes fact and adjudicates questions of a scientific, technical or multidisciplinary nature in relation to these disputes.

The discussion/s are aimed to be built around comparative viewpoints from lawyers, activists and researchers who have been engaged in NGT cases around urban issues from Mangaluru, Pune, Ludhiana, and Bengaluru.

Coordinating Representatives

• French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) – Helene Zerah, Research Director
• Centre for Policy Research – Arkaja Singh, Fellow,
• NLSIU – Neenu Suresh, PhD Scholar
• Commons Cell, NLSIU – Lianne D’Souza, Co-director