The CEECEC project presented its work in India at the fifth Biennial conference of The Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), which was held from January 21-23, 2009 in Ahmedabad under the theme of Environmental Governance. The conference took place at the Gujarat Vidyapeeth, an institution of learning founded by Ghandi in 1920 as a means of empowering Indian youths to throw off colonial rule through education. The University is unique for its method of putting Ghandian ideals into practice, through emphasis on the dignity of labour, khadi spinning and other cottage industries. The current president of the INSEE, Dr. Sudarshan Iyengar, is the Vice Chancellor of the University.

The CEECEC project was presented in a 45 minute plenary session chaired by Joan Martinez Alier on the 22^nd of January with 50 attendees present. Leah Temper of ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona, presented the project´s origins and goals and explained how grass-roots analysis (for instance, of the current conflict between the Vedanta company and the Dongria Kondh in Orissa on bauxite mining) can be translated into the language of ecological economics.

Supriya Singh, of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in Delhi, a member of the CEECEC project, described two cases studies that this CSO is working on. The first examines the village of Hiware Bazar, where environmental investments and tools such as water auditing have turned a formerly drought-stricken town of bootleggers into millionaires through proper management of shared water resources. The case study will make use ecological economics tools to study the institutional factors that led to success in Hiware Bazar, as well as the changes in energy use in the village, and the ecological return on investment of the watershed development work. The case study also looks at how other villages can copy the success of this village by taking advantage of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

The 2^nd case study focuses on Mendha Lekha, a Maria Gondh village in Maharashtra and the only village in India that has been granted the right to manage a primary forest under the Joint Forest Management programme. This case study looks at self governance of sustainable natural resources, forest rights, the ideas of the biomass economy and gross natural product as well as the metabolic profile of the community.

Following on from this event, CEECEC’s next international engagements are scheduled for June 25-26 2009 in Rome (to be hosted by CEECEC’s Italian partner ASUD) and June 29-July 2nd in Ljubljana at the 2009 biennial conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE http://www.esee2009.si/aboutlj.htm).