Over the past three years, the Cities and Climate Change workshop series has provided a space for critical engagement with the question of how climate change is reshaping urban governance in India. It starts by acknowledging that Indian cities have become contested sites of climate action. The workshops have, therefore, focused on understanding whether the adoption of new climate frameworks meaningfully alters urban environmental governance or whether climate policies continue to reproduce existing forms of inequalities. 

The first edition held in 2023 examined the transformative potential of urban climate plans situating them within the longer histories of urbanisation. The participants explored methodological questions of how researchers access data, narratives and lived experiences to better understand urban processes along with themes such as the regimes of land tenure and property making, the extractive relationship between the city and its agrarian hinterland, urban marginality, and environmental justice.

The second edition held in Delhi in 2025 explicitly focused on the politics of knowledge and expertise in climate policy. The discussions in this workshop interrogated whose knowledge defines climate problems and the how scientific, technocratic and local understandings intersect within urban climate interventions. 

The 2026 edition critically examined the politics and narratives of “climate-friendly” development and how such frames tend to obscure underlying issues of toxicity, ecological damage and precarity of livelihoods. There was a shared concern with how climate policies are translated into practice, how research finds its place in policy-making and how civil society is mobilised around climate change.