About

Hallie Eakin is a professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and an affiliated professor in the School of Urban Planning and Geographical Sciences. Her research interests include governance and social equity in socio-ecological systems, household vulnerability and sustainability of adaptations to global change, globalization and the institutional context of vulnerability and adaptation, rural development, sustainable food systems, agricultural change, food sovereignty, and social-ecological resilience. She focuses on the integration of risk into urban and rural development planning and has contributed to understanding the institutional and social factors influencing vulnerability and adaptation in various contexts. Eakin joined ASU in 2008 from the University of California-Santa Barbara. She completed her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Arizona with a minor in Anthropology, and her dissertation examined rural households’ vulnerability and adaptation to climatic variability and institutional change in Central Mexico. Her academic background also includes a Master's degree in Geography from the University of Arizona and a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Brown University. Her work has involved postdoctoral fellowships at the U.S.-Mexican Studies Center at UC San Diego and the Centro de Ciencias de la Atmósfera at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, emphasizing her focus on climate variability, rural livelihoods, and institutional responses to environmental challenges.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Sociology
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Geography
• Environmental resource management
• Computer Security
• Economic system
• Environmental planning
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Engineering
• Process management
• Environmental science
• Management science
• Economic growth
• Finance
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Navigating Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Insights into Transformative Adaptation Governance in Conflicted and Changing Contexts

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-04-11

  bookOpen access

  English Version

  PublisherDOI

• Conceptualizing Meso‐Level Organizations and Their Relations to Catalyze Transformative Climate Adaptation

  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change · 2025-11-01 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Planned adaptation programs and projects typically span organizational levels. Adaptation resources are channeled through networks of actor relations, spanning macro‐level policy and finance actors to micro‐level communities and households. Although undertheorized and rarely the focus of adaptation research, a plethora of organizational actors operate between and across the macro‐ and micro‐levels, playing instrumental roles in the design, implementation, and evaluation of adaptation investments. As pressure mounts for adaptation policy and investment to address emergent risks as well as underlying vulnerability drivers, these “meso‐level” organizations are instrumental in meeting more transformative goals. We conceptualize meso‐level organizations and their relations as a sub‐system in planned climate adaptation investment, operations, and governance that challenges pre‐conceived notions of linear top‐down/bottom‐up flows of adaptation resources and capacities. Synthesizing insights from organization studies, climate adaptation, and sustainability science literatures, we advance a framework to describe and theorize how organizations, by themselves and in groups, contribute to transformative adaptation. The framework structures organizational processes and inter‐organizational dynamics in three dimensions—knowledge synthesis, institutional ambition, and power—and nine subdimensions that depict potential targets for macro‐level investment and policy to build meso‐level transformational capacity, and for meso‐level self‐assessment and reflection for strategic improvement. This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Knowledge and Action in Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Meso-level Organizations in Climate Adaptation for Small-Scale Producers in Sub-Saharan Africa-insights from four African Countries

  Research Square · 2025-07-08

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Negotiating informality and urban resilience: implications for equity

  Ecology and Society · 2025-01-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Informality is a distinguishing characteristic of cities in the Global South and is strongly associated with urban inequality. Yet, in pursuing resilience, urban resilience strategies and planning have yet to grapple with the role of informality in social-ecological dynamics, resulting in incomplete representations of the reality of these cities’ socioeconomic and demographic diversity. Neglect of informality has significant, but uncertain, implications for equity in resilience planning. In this paper, we conceptualize the complex, dynamic urban systems in southern Africa as emergent from the interdependent interactions between formally recognized and so-called “informal” institutions, economic activities, and social-ecological processes and entities. These interactions generate feedback and emergent outcomes locally and at the scale of the broader urban system, with complex implications for urban resilience, equity, and sustainability. We explore the role of informality in urban resilience in relation to two cases of urban environmental crises: drought in Cape Town, South Africa, and flooding in Lilongwe, Malawi. The cases illustrate how managing resilience at one spatial or temporal scale can mask or generate inequitable outcomes at other scales. The role of informality and its linkages need to be acknowledged for informality to be better incorporated into urban resilience planning, as recognition is often the first step to confronting legal and normative barriers and significant power asymmetries. Informality is a malleable social-political construct, and the actors who control its definition have significant influence over the distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resilience in urban systems. Any strategy to improve social equity in urban resilience planning therefore must address the asymmetries in power that characterize the informal/formal divide. Formally recognized organizations that can legitimately bridge informal and formal spaces play key roles in enhancing procedural, and thus distributive, justice outcomes, as well as in creating the collective capacity to address rapid urban change in the Global South.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emergent Polycentric Governance in Response to Drought: Motivations, Transaction Costs, and Feedback in Corporate and City Collaboration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Institutional Change of Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems: Experience from Nepal

  International Journal of the Commons · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The International Journal of the Commons is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal, dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively.These resources may be part of the natural world (e.g. forests, climate systems, or the oceans) or they may be created (e.g. infrastructures such as irrigation systems, the internet or (scientific) knowledge, for example of the sort that is published in open-access journals).The IJC is an initiative of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC).Our aim is to promote inclusion, diversity and equity on this platform. To that purpose (and to the extent that we can), we offer support to majority-country scholars, for example through offering waivers, mentorships, and extra review rounds to authors from low and middle income countries affiliated with institutes from low and middle income countries. Contact us to see what we may be able to do for you.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emergent polycentric governance in response to drought: Motivations, transaction costs, and feedback in corporate and city collaboration

  Environmental Policy and Governance · 2024-11-26 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The threat of service failures because of climate shocks can provoke a re‐negotiation of roles and responsibilities among private and public actors, and a shift towards more polycentric arrangements. This research builds on frameworks for documenting the emergence and evolution of polycentric governance arrangements through an analysis of the enrollment of private corporate actors in water provisioning services in response to the “Day Zero” 2017–2018 drought in Cape Town, South Africa. Through an analysis of interview data, we document the motivations of the corporate and municipal actors to coordinate their efforts to address acute water shortages through a novel governance venue and mechanism: Water Service Intermediaries. We document their experience with collaboration in the governance arrangements that evolved. The case illustrates both the potential, but also the limitations of shifts toward polycentricity in the context of critical resource provisioning. Our actor‐centric approach documents the transaction and material costs associated with new regulatory burdens as the actors negotiated their respective responsibilities and roles. Actors face coordination challenges associated with their dependence on shared physical infrastructure, tensions associated with duties of care towards specific constituencies, and the friction entailed in reconciling their new nodal responsibilities and core missions. While the experiment in this form of polycentric water provisioning was curtailed at the end of the drought, the evidence of feedback and learning among private and public actors indicates a shift in mindsets concerning joint responsibilities for urban resilience, and the potential for future collaboration in polycentric governance around novel issues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using exploratory modeling to challenge narratives of risk governance in Mexico City

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-08-28 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Achieving more sustainable adaptation to social-environmental change demands the transformation of the narratives that provide the rationale for risk governance. These narratives often reflect long-standing beliefs about social and political relationships, ascribe actions and responsibilities, and specify solutions to risk. When such solutions are implemented through material investments in landscapes, these narratives become embedded in physical infrastructure with long legacies. Dominant narratives can mask a range of divergent problem framings. By masking alternatives, narratives can contribute to the persistence of unsustainable governance trajectories. Decision-support tools have begun to represent narratives as drivers of system dynamics; making narratives visible can reveal opportunities for more sustainable governance. We present the results of the project "The Dynamics of Multi-Scalar Adaptation in the Megalopolis", a dynamic, exploratory model of socio-hydrological risks in Mexico City that was designed to both endogenize and simultaneously challenge the dominant narratives that characterize water-risk governance in the city. Qualitative data characterize dominant narratives at city and borough scales. An agent-based model, informed by multicriteria decision analysis and coupled with hydrological, urbanization, and climatic model inputs, permitted the development of exploratory governance scenarios designed to challenge dominant narratives. Scenarios revealed how dominant narratives may contribute to the persistence of vulnerability "hotspots" in the city, despite stated goals of equity and vulnerability alleviation. Participatory workshops with representatives of the city government illustrate how making such narratives visible through exploratory modeling can lead to a questioning of prior assumptions and causal relations, recognition of a need for intersectoral collaboration, and insights into potential management strategies.

  PublisherDOI

• Private provisioning of public adaptation: Integration of cognitive-behavioral, adaptive capacity, and institutional approaches

  Global Environmental Change · 2023-11-24 · 9 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Integration of urban science and urban climate adaptation research: opportunities to advance climate action

  npj Urban Sustainability · 2023-06-10 · 59 citations

  reviewOpen access

  There is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in the Global South, the specificities and history of its cities must be central to the study of how well-known agglomeration effects can facilitate adaptation. The proposed effort calls for the co-creation of knowledge involving scientists and stakeholders, especially those historically excluded from the design and implementation of urban development policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CNH: The Dynamics of Multi-Scalar Adaptation in Megacities

  NSF · $1.5M · 2014–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Luís Tapia

  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

  35 shared

• Lakshmi Charli-Joseph

  Instituto de Ecología

  23 shared

• Maria Carmen Lemos

  18 shared

• Amy M. Lerner

  University of California, San Diego

  15 shared

• Bertha Hernández Aguilar

  15 shared

• J. Mario Siqueiros-García

  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

  14 shared

• David Manuel‐Navarrete

  Arizona State University

  13 shared

• Rebecca Shelton

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Geography

  University of Arizona

  2002

• M.A., Geography

  University of Arizona

  1998

• B.A., Environmental Studies

  Brown University

  1993