Vishal Narain

This introduction to the special issue on "Gender and sustainable development in the mountains- Transformative innovations, tenacious resistances" by Ritu Verma et al published in the journal Mountain Research and Development, highlights the poor situation of women as well as gender discrim

The India Infrastructure Report (2011) brought out by the Infrastructure Development Finance Company focuses on 'water' and seeks to 'evolve an appropriate policy framework from the perspective of rights, entitlements, and conflict resolution mechanisms'. The report aims to answer the following questions:

• How clear is the strategic vision for water resource management and sustainable development?
• How effective and equitable is the legal framework?
• Given that only the supply-side approach will not help in meeting future demand, what legal, regulatory, institutional, and pricing mechanisms will be necessary to efficiently manage and restrain demand?

It is a part of the peri-urban water security project discussion paper series that aims at having a collection of research papers relevant to the concepts and processes involved in the project that represent preliminary ideas circulated to encourage discussion and comments.

Though the relevant literature is cited at many places, this is not intended to be a literature review per se, but instead seeks to develop a shared framework to identify a set of common issues and questions that merit investigation.

The paper argues that peri-urban can be better understood in terms of its characteristics - a mix of agricultural and non-agricultural land uses, flows of goods, services and resources between villages and urban centers and a social profile that is very heterogeneous and in a state of flux. All these impact upon the local natural resource base, creating particular environmental and natural resource management problems that are often beyond the scope of urban or rural governments alone and require innovative ways of being addressed.