Air Pollution Governance in 6+ Cities

• In Event: Air Pollution Governance: Sites, Styles, Histories

Abstract

The Air Pollution Governance Across Cities Study (known as the 6+ Cities Study) works to characterize comparative insight and cross-city dialogue in identifying air pollution as the world’s largest single environmental health risk.

The 6+ Cities Study aims to characterize distinctive styles of environmental health and risk governance, at the city scale. Through interviews, observation of public events, and analysis of media, government, NGO and scientific reports, the study team is examining different stakeholder roles and perspectives, links between policy domains (especially environment, transportation, health, and education), and links across scale (urban, state, national, and international). Originally, there were six cities in the study, with research groups in each city (Beijing, Bangalore, Houston, Philadelphia, New York City, and Albany, funded by the US National Science Foundation). The study has now expanded to include four more Indian cities (Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune, funded by the Azim Premji Foundation), and Los Angeles. Methodologically, the study models and advances capacity for multi-sited, internationally collaborative anthropological field research on education-to-science-to-policy pathways, which can be used to address a wide range of complex societal problems.

In this presentation, we’ll describe how the 6+ City Study has developed, and what we have learned so far.

Authors

• Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

• Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine