Green versus Brown Agendas

Before we turn to a presentation of the stakeholder groups we give a brief introduction to the concept of green versus brown agendas and how this theory serves as our theoretical lens for understanding the political friction around the Bagmati river.

Urban environmental problems may be in general terms divided into two categories; green and brown agendas. Issues relating to sanitary and environmental health that heavily affect the low-income groups in the society, are referred to as brown agendas. These agendas are deemed more relevant to the cities in the global south. While issues that are recently promoted by environmentalists focussing on less resource consumption and depletion, climate change and ecosystem disruptions come under the green agendas, which tend to be more relevant to the global north. The green agendas have a vision for long-term ecological sustainability while brown agendas focus on immediate health problems being faced by the more economically deprived people (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2000). Conflicts have been arising between advocates of these agendas, regarding what should be prioritized in development plans, especially in regions of where environmental health problems are serious and the management institutions are weaker, like in parts of Africa or South Asia (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2000). This debate is linked to the question of whether the focus for the future development of cities should be on more sustainable development or to fulfill the immediate needs of the people, also leading to a discussion on whether simply copying the ideas that worked in the global north to the poorer cities can be of any effect. In her study on brown agendas in the context of the Bagmati river, Shrestha (2009) discussed how there is a need to mainstream brown agendas in the definition of sustainable development, referring the case of eviction of squatter settlements along the Bagmati river and the lack of regard for the these people in the Bagmati action plan, which tends to focus more on the green agendas.

Beyond the concept of green versus brown agendas that focuses on the conflicting scopes within environmental issues and on the question, whether public health or sustainable ecosystems is the most pressing problem, there are several cases where environmental issues as a whole are in conflict with social development. While questions of environmental sustainability become more and more traction in the context of global climate change and ongoing urbanization, sometimes measures of ecological development lead to trade-offs with social development like intensifying gentrification due to the beautification of urban areas through the creation of parks (Haase et. al., 2017). These conflicts between ecological and social issues can also be observed on the urban riverbanks of Bagmati, where the calls for restoration of the river and the plans for green public areas are threatening the homes of people living along the river.