Division of Resource Economics: The Megacity Project Hyderabad
»Greater Hyderabad«, a fast growing metropolitan region in Southern India, will reach 10.5 million inhabitants by 2015. The emerging megacity experiences rapid economic growth enabling higher living standards and modern lifestyles for the emerging middle class. This is, however, accompanied by escalating energy and resource consumption and constantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions per capita. These new issues arise while the old problems are still unresolved. Approximately one third of the population is living below poverty line and continues to suffer from severe food and health problems. In addition to this, climate change is predicted to lead to extreme weather events, disastrous floods, strong heat waves, extreme droughts and increasing water scarcity.
Given this natural, social and economic context of the emerging megacity, the question arises what can be considered a reasonable response to the anticipated climate change impact? This guiding research question of the Project requires exploring greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation strategies and ways towards increased energy efficiency and renewable energy. However, it is important to note that this project is a social science project, or to express it more precisely, the core modules of analysis follow the hypothesis that “getting the institutions right” is one main key to solve the problems of sustainable resource use in general and sustainable demands on climate and energy in particular. Whether or not a society will be able to cope with the climate change impact and increased scarcity of energy depends on its capacity to change human behavior. This requires changing institutions, defined as “sets of rules”, and governance structures, i.e. those “modes of organization” that are necessary to put rules into practice.
Generating knowledge for an effective transition of institutions and governance structures can lead to a “Sustainable Hyderabad”, provided that the actors in the action arenas of Greater Hyderabad will be successful in transforming this knowledge into collective action that supports such basic social change. [ more ]
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Konrad Hagedorn
Room: 218
Phone +49-30-2093-6305
E-Mail: k.hagedorn@agrar.hu-berlin.de
Office:
Sigrid Heilmann
Phone: +49 (0)30 2093 6305
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093 6497
E-Mail: s.heilmann@agrar.hu-berlin.de
Address:
Division of Resource Economics
Department of Agricultural Economics
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6 (mail address)
Philippstr. 13, Haus 12 (visitors) D-10099 Berlin
Website of »Megacity Project«
The core hypothesis of the project is that »getting the institutions right« is one main key to solve the problems of sustainable resource use and to achieve a sustainable development of the Hyderabad region.
Website of the Division of Resource Economics