Thesis Title: The Policy Climate for Climate Policy: Examining the interplay between climate change resilience approaches and their policy process contexts

Research Topic: Resilience and adaptation to climate change in developing countries is fundamentally interrelated with other development policies. My research examines the interplay of policy making processes and approaches to climate change resilience. Drawing on case studies of two Indian cities from a major international resilience project, it considers how adaptation approaches are influenced by the policy making context in which they are formulated, as well as how particular adaptation approaches inform the policy process.

Using a set of complementary analytical lenses that include actors and networks, discourse, policy spaces, the research examines key issues in climate change resilience. These include the challenges of community participation in urban areas; networks of clientelism and how they mediate adaptive capacity; the need for framing policy issues precisely; the impact of an adaptation project on community cohesion in an urban context; adaptation interventions enhancing collaboration between departments providing urban services; and the need for highly disaggregated approaches to adaptation even within seemingly uniform urban areas.

The research also argues that issues of politics and power are more significant determinants of the resilience than conventional, techno-managerial approaches would suggest.