The environment is implicated in all human activities, spheres, locations, and scales: production and consumption, domestic and commercial, urban and rural, local and global. Consequently, the governance of the environment is also a vast topic, covering the use of natural resources such as forests, water, and minerals as well as the disposal of waste products and other impacts that emerge, such as air and water pollution, and questions of biodiversity loss and climate change. In this essay on re-imagining the future of environmental governance in India, we cover some of the overarching issues, but focus particularly on issues related to pollution regulation at multiple levels—the day-to-day monitoring and enforcement by pollution control boards, the setting of standards, and the regulation of potentially polluting industrial projects through the environmental clearance process—leaving other dimensions such as governance of forest and water resources to other essays.1 Given, however, the strong connection between ‘local’ pollution (air, water, soil, or solid waste) and the‘global’ pollutant that is causing climate change (CO2),2 we include a discussion on the governance of carbon emissions in this essay. We use the term environmental governance rather than environmental management or pollution regulation because we include not just polluters and regulators, but also the pollutees, that is, those experiencing the pollution, wider civil society groups, the judiciary, and the state that sets up and influences many of these processes and institutions, including the legal framework governing pollution. After a brief overview of the current state of affairs and its likely causes, we present an alternative vision that involves shifts in normative ideas, ideologies,institutions, and cultures, and the bounding assumptions we make in developing this vision. We then offer a few thoughts on how a transition towards this vision might begin.