Dr Tanvi Deshpande Dual BSc, MSc, PhD

Dr Tanvi Deshpande

Research & Impact Fellow
Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action

Contact details

Address
Elm House
Edgbaston Park
351 Bristol Road
Birmingham
B5 7SW

Tanvi is a social scientist working on multi-scalar climate governance issues, particularly cities in the global South. She studies how decisionmakers plan and implement policies to build resilient societies against contemporary global crises like climate change.

Qualifications

  • Fellow of Royal Geographical Society, London, UK, 2025
  • PhD in Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany, 2022
  • MSc in Climate Change, University College London, UK, 2013
  • Dual BSc in Chemistry and Environmental Science, Fergusson College, University of Pune, India, 2011-12

Biography

Tanvi joined the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action (BISCA) as a research and impact fellow. She is also currently a visiting fellow with the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub in Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Her under-graduate and post-graduate training was in the natural sciences, where she gained technical proficiency on human interactions with the environment and climate. Tanvi then began working on social science aspects of climate issues at a research and praxis organization in India. This experience inspired her academic transition to the social sciences during her PhD which has continued in her post-doctoral stints.

As a scholar from the global South, she hopes to highlight unique characteristics, find synergies between diverse contexts, and develop contextually appropriate governance approaches for the global South. Over the last decade, her research has focused on a range of climate adaptation, justice, and governance issues in the global South. At the Indian Institute for Human Settlements she worked on informal settlements and climate justice issues in India as part of the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia project. Her doctoral research focused on water politics and government policymaking capacities in small town India. During her post-doctoral stint with King’s College London, she worked on the Tomorrow’s Cities project to co-develop a pro-poor, inclusive, multi-hazard risk assessment framework for cities of the global South (Nepal, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, Turkey, Palestine etc.). Her recent research at LSE has focused on critically examining climate governance frameworks from a decolonisation and contextualisation perspective. Inspired by her research and experiences, she co-developed the Frontiers for Just Cities in South Asia Network. This is an early career researcher network working on urban governance issues in South Asia to share research and explore collaborations in the region.