Biography
Aditya Valiathan Pillai is a researcher focused on the governance dimensions of adapting to climate change. He is a doctoral researcher at King’s College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi. His current project applies methods from comparative politics to understand why some places adapt to extreme heat better than others. His previous work focused on strengthening institutions to deal with climate change, through cross-country academic work and a stint as a Programme Officer at The Asia Foundation where he anchored grants to civil society organisations working on adaptation across South Asia.
Aditya is a member of the Technical Advisory Group to the National Disaster Management Authority and an Associate at the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University. He was formerly a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, where he established a research area on climate adaptation, and the Coordinator of the Adaptation and Resilience group at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi. He was part of the founding team of the Sustainable Futures Collaborative. His academic work has appeared in Science, Environmental Politics, Environmental Research Letters, the Oxford Handbook series, and a variety of Indian and international media publications.
Research
Thesis title: 'Extreme heat governance: a comparative analysis of why some subnational governments in India do better than others'
Climate change is poised to inflict extreme heat on much of the world in the coming decades, leading to increased mortality and diminished economic productivity. This is a particularly acute challenge for countries in the Global South, which are at once hotter and have lower levels of state capacity to mitigate and deal with the consequences.
While many countries and sub-national governments are developing ambitious, multi-sectoral heat action plans, these plans are inherently complex and difficult to implement. They require coordination within and across departments that push bureaucracies into uncomfortable new operational patterns, a deeply localised understanding of how heat interacts with society, and enough flexibility to allow for minute variation in response, sometimes at the level of adjacent neighbourhoods. Extreme heat and heatwaves force states to operate at levels of granularity and experimentation they are neither built for nor comfortable with.
This project aims to understand why some governments do better than others in designing and implementing these crucial heat plans. Specifically, it aims to build methods that help us see variations in state response across sub-national cases and then investigate the political and historical causes for these variations in performance. Findings could help governments across the world structure their heat governance institutions better, thereby saving lives and preserving economic vitality.
PhD supervision
- Co-supervisor: Professor Louise Tillin
- Co-supervisor: Dr George Adamson