Dr. Hita Unnikrishnan is an Assistant Professor at The Institute for Global Sustainable Development, The University of Warwick. She is also an affiliate at the Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield, a visiting faculty at Azim Premji University, India; a senior fellow at Blue Range Labs, and an external affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University. 

Previously she was a Research Associate and Newton International Fellow (British Academy) at the Urban Institute, Sheffield and a researcher at Azim Premji University, India. She has been one of the founding members of and has (co)led the Early Career Network of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC-ECN) from 2021-2024, and has been associated with various urban collectives including The Nature of Cities and development organisations such as the UN Habitat and the World Bank. She is also an academic podcaster with the In Common Podcast. 

Her research takes three distinctive themes which coalesce around environmental governance, social justice, and environmental change: 

a) Trajectories: Her work highlights the importance of understanding the influence of development trajectories on geophysical, political, and cultural transformations of social ecological systems, particularly as they relate to the multiple contested ways in which urban ecological resources are perceived and appropriated in cities of the global south. She focuses particularly on urban water and energy systems and their evolution through time, as well as the imaginaries surrounding their transformation and its implications on historical and contemporary forms of marginalisation within the current climate crisis. 

b) Sustainability Policy and Environmental Governance: particularly in the context of urban environmental commons and using a diversity of theoretical underpinnings most notably  Ostromian institutional analysis perspectives, urban political ecology, public health discourses, and resilience. 

c) Community and co-production: Developing nuanced perspectives around community centric approaches of managing urban social ecological systems. Her research has examined the historically heterogeneous and exclusionary nature of communities even within exemplars of "egalitarian" community led practices of water management and the plurality of ways in which the term co-production is employed in diverse sectors such as forestry, water, and energy along with their implications for inclusivity and justice. Her research further demonstrates the lack of clarity on what constitutes a community across policy, academia, and praxis, leading to massive implications for inclusive and just energy transitions.