The IIHS School of Environment and Sustainability is interested in a range of approaches to understanding environmental governance challenges in the Global South. Ongoing work has focussed particularly on questions of governance of natural resources and environmental infrastructure, besides the intersections of the latter with a range of other aspects of urban and regional governance. These include but are not limited to spatial planning, infrastructure, law, public policy, economic development and challenges around transboundary environmental governance questions.
Research has also examined environmental governance institutional frameworks and mechanisms at the sub-national scale, specifically looking at the Indian context. IIHS is especially interested in continuing to develop this work at the sub-national scale; as well as the connections between local and regional governance approaches; and national and global policy (for example, the role that sub-national governance may play in fulfilling commitments made to international policy conventions).
Through this work, IIHS intends to examine not only the governance challenges, but also examine the politics of the process, studying the different state and non-State stakeholders. IIHS will also continue to study questions of environmental governance at the urban/regional scale focussing specifically on natural resource and infrastructure governance across a range of social-ecological contexts, especially the rural to urban transect, to be expanded to other urbanising regions across the Global South. IIHS is interested specifically in focusing on global-national-regional-local governance continuities and discontinuities as an important aspect of this research.