“Impact is possible if you are an authentic leader”

Last week, the Fletcher South Asia Society presented an important talk on campus with Dr. Arunabha Ghosh, the founding CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water. CEEW counts among Asia’s leading policy research institutions and the world’s 20 best climate think tanks. Prior to his talk, Ghosh and Dean Kyte signed an agreement of cooperation between Fletcher and CEEW. The agreement, which will involve research, fellowships, and sponsored events, comes at a key moment as the university is discussing the advent of a new global strategy and pivoting relationships and strategic partnerships to the Global South.

“There’s no way to imagine the future in terms of sustainable development, economic development, and different poles of power without going through Delhi, the vibrancy of the Indian economy, and the interesting developments of Indian political life,” said Dean Kyte.

To learn more, we spoke with Ghosh about sustainability, the role of think tanks, and opportunity in India.

The Fletcher School: How did your journey on the topic of sustainability policy begin?

Arunabha Ghosh: I'm a creative economist by training, and I've also worked on a range of other public policy issues, from access to medicines to conflict over natural resources. Around the time of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I felt something was broken, not just in the way governments across the world were approaching problems, but also how they were negotiating with each other. We were trapped in a legitimate argument about historical injustice but without agency to address it. I felt that we needed to create a framework for emerging markets to think about what their development trajectory would look like, designing policies to build infrastructure, change behavior, attract investment, and create jobs, sustainably.

For readers who have not heard of the CEEW, what should they know about the organization?

The Council on Energy, Environment and Water envisions to use data-integrated analysis to explain and change the use, reuse, and misuse of resources. We are a policy research institution that also works very closely with policy stakeholders in government, industry, and communities. We organize our work around system-level transformations. This includes the energy transition and industrial policy, but also quality of life issues: the food we ingest, the water we drink, the air we breathe, how we move, how we heat and cool ourselves.

We have a dedicated Center for Energy Finance, which promotes technology cooperation, the circular economy, and resource efficiency. We do research on national-level policy issues and advise dozens of state governments, but we also have an international outlook. We've worked with many other emerging markets. We've helped to create one of the world's newest intergovernmental organizations, the International Solar Alliance. We are one of the very few institutions in the Global South whose work stretches from international negotiations all the way down to village-level interventions.

What makes the think tank landscape in India unique?

First of all, India has a lot of think tanks—the fourth-largest number after the United States, China, and Germany, But the arc of a career a public policy is less defined in a country like India than the United States.

The best think tanks in the United States came up in the aftermath of the First World War, when the US emerged as one of the world's largest economies and had to come up with ideas not only of how to govern itself, but how to shape the global system. In the US, there is a developed “revolving door” of public policy. It’s different in India, where you're either in government or not in government. Our aim is to develop a genuinely independent think tank that works closely with government and helps build careers in public policy.

Today’s emerging economies in the Global South will drive much of global economic growth, much of global energy growth, much of global infrastructure growth. We must figure out the design of our national development trajectories, but also where we fit in global economic and political matters. We need the best and the brightest to wade into a very complex world of public policy.

The United Nations projects that India will become the most populous country in the world this April. Many other observers believe that's indeed already happened. On balance, do you generally see urbanization and population growth as a challenge for sustainability or an opportunity?

On balance, it is an opportunity. The challenge is not about population, but about lifestyles. If Indians or Chinese or Indonesians aspire to the resource-intensive lifestyles of the average American or European, then the planet certainly doesn't have enough resources for everybody. Meeting the basic needs of the population is possible if we have a resource-efficient approach.

This is where the opportunity arises. A lot of clean energy infrastructure is far more jobs-intensive than fossil-based infrastructure. Every 18 months at CEEW, we measure the number of jobs created in renewables. We’ll have a workforce of a million people in large-scale solar and wind by 2030, two million people in sustainable cooling by 2045, and another two million people in green hydrogen by 2050.

The economic transition benefits from the demographic shift. In an aging society, savings would be dwindling, but in a young economy, savings are growing and contributing to capital investment in new sectors. Young talent will build the economies of the future. There is more risk-taking with young populations. The population growth is a source of strength.

At CEEW, we have more than 230 staff, and our median age is under 30. Why? Because India's average age is 27. I cannot aspire to build a public policy institution that designs the economy of the the future unless it's representative of the country’s dominant, young demographic.

As you work to contribute research and ideas to the field, what do you see as the most under-researched and under-explored topics in sustainability?

One of the most under-researched topics is hyperlocal climate risks. To insure against risks that are nonlinear, you need a hyperlocal understanding of those risks.

Today, if I were to buy a home in Florida, I could get a neighborhood-by-neighborhood assessment of flood risk, and that would determine the insurance I have to take on. If I wanted to buy a home in South Africa or Vietnam, I will not have that information. Without that information, the very regions of the world where most infrastructure will get built find it difficult to insure that infrastructure.

Another area is developing business models for decentralized infrastructure. The scale of markets in developed economies permits one to have large-scale investment in individual projects. In the Global South, the portfolio size can be big, but the project size might be small. If you've not figured out how to downscale your capital investment in a manner that can be distributed across a large geography, it becomes harder to translate the technologies of the future into the communities of today.

You’ve worked at inter-governmental organizations like the United Nations and the WTO, you run a think tank, you've worked in academia, and you write commentary for the news media. Where and how do you think someone can have the most impact?

Impact is possible if you are an authentic leader. You can have impact as a government official, as an academic, as a policy entrepreneur, as a journalist or a columnist, or even in the private sector, but only if you're an authentic leader.

What does that mean? Number one, you're intellectually honest about your ideas. You must be honest about the downsides of ideas. Number two, you’re willing to build coalitions and collaborative platforms, giving others an opportunity to work together. Number three, especially in an institutional setting, the welfare of your subordinates must matter more than your own. Care about your team more than you care about yourself. That's the formula.

What benefits did you receive from pursuing a PhD?

I started my PhD after having worked in the United Nations. So of course, in the first few weeks, I struggled with the sudden absence of meetings. It was a very lonely experience. I think the most important thing I took from it was building resilience. Others can advise you, whether it's your committee, your PhD cohort, or even your family, but you have to do the work on your own. The only competition is yourself.

Another benefit is to learn research methods. It does not matter what method you apply in your thesis, you must understand as many research methods as possible so that you are able to comprehend what others are writing. The faster you can accumulate more knowledge, the faster you can apply it to your work. The ability to connect the dots using different methods allows you to navigate new challenges that emerge, in the academy and beyond.

Read more about Fletcher’s PhD programs.