Collaborative Governance and Polycentric Policy Learning in Climate Action: A Diagnostic Assessment of India’s Green Policy Framework

Climate change governance epitomises the limits of hierarchical policymaking and highlights the growing reliance on collaborative governance arrangements operating across sectors, levels, and institutional boundaries. While polycentric governance is often advanced as a solution to governing complex, transboundary problems, less attention has been paid to how collaboration, learning, and coordination actually function within such systems, and where they break down. This paper advances a legal and policy analysis of India’s multi-faceted climate and green policy framework through the lens of polycentric governance and adaptive co-management. Drawing on Ostrom’s (2009) conception of polycentric systems and the Paris Agreement’s bottom-up architecture, the study conceptualises climate policymaking as a collaborative, multi-actor governance regime characterterised by diffused authority and fragmented learning. Methodologically, the paper develops an Adaptive Co-Management (ACM) index as a diagnostic governance tool to assess how collaborative and polycentric policy architectures translate policy intent into coordinated action. The index evaluates India’s green policies along dimensions of authority dispersion, inter-institutional coordination, learning mechanisms, and adaptability. This ex-ante institutional assessment is complemented by an ex-post analysis of sectoral emissions trends, ND-GAIN scores, and NGFS transition pathways. The findings reveal that formal polycentricity does not automatically yield effective collaborative governance in India. Coordination failures, sectoral silos, and uneven subnational capacities constrain learning and collective action. These patterns point toward a need for diagnostic tools such as ACM for effectively assessing institutional conditions enabling collaboration to produce durable outcomes.