DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR - Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition - Sciences Po

How do urbanization and rural development impact communities differently? How can we make public policy and enlightened self-interest advance climate action?

Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a Development Clinician, diagnosing development of cities and nation states. A Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York and at Sciences Po, Paris, he was the founder chair-holder of the European Chair for Sustainable Development and Climate Transition at Sciences Po. He helped set up the initial national and regional networks of the global Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

His publications cover a range of issues: planning, institutions and governance of sustainable development; climate change mitigation, adaptation, risks and offsets; and ecosystem management. He edited Re-living the Memories of an Indian Forester: Memoirs of S. Shyam Sunder and is presently writing The Fallacy of Evidence-Based Policy Making.

He convened and chaired the Independent Task Force on Creative Climate Action. Dr. Someshwar received a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he was a Bell-MacArthur fellow at Harvard University. He has two masters’ degrees, on housing and on environmental planning, and is also trained as a professional architect. He has previously worked at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and the World Bank in Washington D.C.

"Let me start by saying what we should not be looking at, which, unfortunately, a lot of well-informed development agencies are – and they call it climate-proofing cities. That is a mistake because you cannot climate-proof anything. And it also gives the population and policymakers a wrong sense. The correct term is climate-smart. So how do you get climate-smart? It's not easy.

And a key question I always ask my students is when people use the term stakeholders. That's like a throwaway term. Oh, we need to get all the stakeholders around the table. Okay, what stake do they hold? What stake does a civil society leader hold? What does a community member hold? Don't assume that they're holding a certain interest in their minds. Make that clear." 

https://www.sciencespo.fr/psia/sites/sciencespo.fr.psia/files/ITFClimateReport_Web.pdf www.amazon.com/Reliving-Memories-Indian-Forester-Memoir/dp/9388337131

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