Udisha Saklani is a Lecturer in Human Geography and Climate in the Department of Geography at King's College London, which she joined in September 2025. Her research focuses on environmental governance, infrastructure, and development, with particular attention to how finance, state institutions, and local agency shape climate and energy transitions across the Global South.

She completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge in 2023, where her doctoral research explored the political and institutional dynamics shaping large hydropower development in the Himalayas, across local, national, and regional contexts. Her research has been published in journals including Geoforum, Environmental Science & Policy, Energy Policy, Water Alternatives, and Renewable Energy.

Alongside her academic work, Udisha has worked with governments and international organisations including UNDP, Oxfam Novib, and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), contributing to the design and evaluation of climate, water, and infrastructure programmes across the Indo-Pacific.

Before joining King's, Udisha was a Lecturer in Human Geography at Monash University (2023-2024), teaching core Master's courses on corporate sustainability and sustainability measurement. She holds a Master in Public Policy from the National University of Singapore and a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.

Research

• Governance and political economy of infrastructure
• Finance, state-market relations, and development pathways
• Water governance and transboundary hydropolitics
• Distribution, equity, and contestation in climate transitions
• Digital governance and data-driven infrastructure systems

Udisha’s research examines how infrastructure, finance, and state institutions shape climate and development pathways in the Global South. Her work focuses on water and energy systems, drawing on extensive fieldwork in South Asia and policy engagement across the Indo-Pacific. Adopting a political economy approach, she analyses how large-scale infrastructure projects are governed, financed, and contested, and how they produce uneven social and environmental outcomes. Across her work, she is particularly interested in questions of distribution, legitimacy, and institutional power in climate transitions, with empirical focus on hydropower and water governance. Building on this, she is developing a new strand of research on digital governance and AI in urban infrastructure systems, examining how data-driven technologies are reshaping decision-making, accountability, and state–citizen relations in cities across the Global South.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1008 Geography Tutorials: Critical Thinking & Techniques
• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 5SSG1011 Principles of Geographical Inquiry
• 5SSG2016 Geographical Research Skills - Electives

Postgraduate

• 7QQMM900 The Challenges of Climate Change
• 7SSGN176 Fundamentals of Climate Change
• 7SSGN002 Practising Social Research
• 7SSGN119 Fundamentals of Risk, Disasters and Resilience

Further details

See Udisha's research profile