Thursday
26
March 2026
10:00 - 11:00 AM IST
Location
Room 008, Amrut Mody School of Management
Central Campus
Share
Why Does State-Led Extreme Heat Adaptation Occur When the Costs and Benefits of Action are Diffuse?
Research Seminar Series
Aditya Pillai
Doctoral Researcher
Kings College London
Visiting Fellow at Sustainable Futures Collaborative
Speaker
While the politics of climate adaptation reliably explain why governments pursue actions with concentrated benefits or resist those with concentrated costs, the conditions driving state actions with diffuse costs and benefits remain theoretically neglected. This session will explore findings from research that examines this gap by investigating extreme heat resilience measures across nine Indian cities in nine states, selected using CMIP6 projections of heat index extremes in a 1.5-degree world.
Drawing on a multi-sectoral survey and 88 semi-structured interviews with government officials, the study identifies 25 implemented heat resilience strategies, 16 of which involve diffuse costs and benefits. Despite expected political pressure from constituents for interventions with concentrated benefits, we find that the implementation of diffuse actions is primarily driven by forms of bureaucratic accountability rather than citizen demand.
Top-down emergency directives and the threat of negative media coverage surrounding heat-related fatalities create concentrated professional costs for local bureaucrats, particularly within health and disaster management departments. Ultimately, we argue that an emerging “no heat deaths” norm is shaping state adaptation policy. To preserve state legitimacy and avoid the highly visible fallout of climate casualties, bureaucrats enact short-term emergency responses with distributed costs and benefits.
Speaker
Aditya Pillai
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 and part of the founding team of the Sustainable Futures Collaborative.
His work has appeared in Science, Environmental Politics, Environmental Research Letters, the Oxford Handbook series, and Indian and international media.
