Building climate resilience through public works – evidence from India’s NREGA
9 Nov 2026
12:30 -13:30
Times shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W2.01 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Energy Policy Research Group seminar
Speaker: Dr Anton Heil, University of Oxford
About the seminar topic
Public works programmes are a promising policy tool for climate adaptation, but their effectiveness depends on the local political economy through which they are administered. Using a novel dataset of over 80 million construction projects from India’s NREGA combined with satellite-based weather and agricultural productivity data at the village-council level, I document 3 facts on how weather shocks, electoral incentives and adaptation infrastructure interact.
First, severe droughts shift NREGA construction sharply toward water-management infrastructure, raising its share by 14 percentage points within 2 years and crowding out social housing works targeted at vulnerable households. Second, the effect is concentrated in droughts coinciding with state assembly elections, when the water-management share rises by up to 50 percentage points more than in non-election periods. This is consistent with a political-economy channel rather than a demand-driven response. Third, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the local stock of water management infrastructure generated by the timing of past droughts relative to past elections.
I find that the projects that were selected due to heightened electoral pressure, possibly for higher visibility rather than technical need, do not measurably improve agricultural productivity or resilience. Taken together, the results highlight the role of political incentives in decentralised climate adaptation with distributional consequences for the intended beneficiaries.
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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Henning Zschietzshmann.