Scale and modularity in thermal governance: The replication of India’s heat action plans

Abstract

Since 2013, when the first urban Heat Action Plan in India was developed in and for the western city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, there are now more than 30 such plans focused on different cities, regions, and entire states in the country, many following the original template developed in Ahmedabad. This article investigates the temporal and spatial politics of such heat action planning, asking: what is the nature of thermal governance that Heat Action Plans posit? Based on our analysis, we suggest that two key attributes characterise Indian Heat Action Plans: first, they frame heat waves as disasters; second, as the Ahmedabad template has travelled to other locations, Heat Action Plans have ceased to engage with their local contexts in any meaningful way. We further argue that such a conceptualisation of Heat Action Plans has produced important obfuscations, shaping official knowledge about and responses to extreme heat in ways that are unable to grapple with the messy, uneven, and contested nature of the socio-political terrains in which they are supposed to intervene.