Voices of the Poor on Policy Design, Climate Change and Water

Centralized governance has largely failed to address climate change and conservation. Democratic decentralization offers a promising alternative, particularly for the poor, who are most vulnerable to climate impacts yet most excluded from centralized decisionmaking. This talk argues that decentralized institutional structures can give marginalized communities a direct voice in resource allocation and climate adaptation. It examines the political economy of local governance design, showing how micro-politics shapes institutions and outcomes in ways that top-down, uniform approaches cannot.

Decentralization is never uniform as local contestations produce diverse institutional forms, determining whether devolution becomes genuinely democratic and accountable, or slides into recentralization. Drawing on voices of the poor across India's diverse agro-climatic zones, the talk presents a model of water governance centered on democratic deliberation at the local level, offering lessons for climate-resilient policymaking and community empowerment.
 

Satyajit Singh is a Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include the power and politics of policy formulation, policy design, decentralized implementation, climate change, and water. He has worked on policy design and implementation on the ground with environmental movements in India and the Asia-Pacific region during his stints at The World Bank and work with the UNDP and other international development institutions.​​​​