Impacts of sustainable consumption and production initiatives in energy and waste management sectors: examples from India.

Energy and waste management sectors are considered important for the country's progress towards adopting sustainable consumption and production (SCP) practices and achieving Sustainable Development Goals. However, the rapid pace of urbanization, energy-intensive growth approaches, and generation of large quantities of waste have led to severe environmental degradation of cities in India. While the government has taken several initiatives for increasing resource efficiency, limited research has been done in an Indian context to explore the policy and institutional factors. The paper focuses on challenges relating to policy enablers within the energy management in buildings and construction and demolition waste sectors; 28 semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders associated with both these sectors. The findings indicate that though India has been integrating climate change measures into its national policies and enhancing the domestic market's readiness for a circular economy, successful implementation of policy framework(s) urgently requires lifestyle and behavioural changes in the society. The study further identified the role of key stakeholders including government, businesses, and consumers, for transition to a low-carbon economy for both these sectors. This paper presents a bottom-up approach to understand the changes required in the enabling environment for the uptake of SCP practices that can be adapted by other emerging economies in the Asia Pacific region for building resource efficiency. The importance of soft factors relating to institutional capacities and governance structure is raised by the analysis in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]