https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37373739

Author
Mahajan, Aseem Kumar

2022

Abstract
Climate mitigation, geoengineering, and adaptation present humans with new
opportunities and challenges. The three essays that comprise this
dissertation use diverse methods — a randomized control trial, formal
model, and qualitative interviews — to examine how political actors respond
to each of these three prongs of climate policy. Chapter 1 examines how
affordable solar lanterns alter household behavior and improve the quality
of life in rural India. It demonstrates that renewable energy can serve as
an effective stopgap for households not yet reached by India’s national
electrification campaign. Chapter 2 studies the security implications of
solar geoengineering, a novel technology that can reduce global
temperatures, and counter-geoengineering that reverses these effects. It
shows how the deployment of both technologies may produce an international
climate "tug-of-war" over global temperatures. In some settings, the threat
of war or wasteful deployment may curtail deployment. Such cooperative
equilibria are fragile, as the inability to monitor, detect, or attribute
deployment induces countries to divert from agreements. Chapter 3 conducts
one of the first political studies of a state climate adaptation program.
It aims to fit adaptation into existing political frameworks, finding gaps
between theory and qualitative evidence collected from interviews with
municipal stakeholders. Collectively, the three essays demonstrate how
political science might shed insight on these unexplored developments, and
how climate change raises questions that demand more exploration.

Citation
Mahajan, Aseem Kumar. 2022. Essays on Political Responses to Climate Change
Mitigation, Geoengineering, and Adaptation. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard
University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

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