ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ways in which air pollution advocacy and science intersect in India. It considers the two predominant styles of their coupling: science for regulation, and science for public understanding. When practitioners assemble to bridge silos and foster interdisciplinary thinking, they contend with these concerns, while creating new spaces and communities of collaborations. The chapter call this new discursive space ‘science for advocacy’. It discusses the dilemmas and caveats Delhi’s ‘expert-advocates’ deal with: first, they are forced to work under compressed time. While newer institutions take advantage of these changing conditions and compressed time, the urgency forecloses other institutional engagements, such as long-term public health research or understanding livelihoods in Delhi’s toxic neighbourhoods. The second concern is that as expert-advocates shift attention beyond Delhi, questions and critique of political economy within Delhi recede into the background.
