N. C. Narayanan works on the political economy of governance in urban water, sanitation and energy services and asks: why technically and socially inadequate solutions persist despite evidence against them, and what political, institutional and epistemic conditions enable the governance of urban environmental commons as public goods in a climate-changing world. He is the author or editor of five books, and has published peer-reviewed journal articles across water, sanitation, energy and environmental governance. Publications List

From 2017 to 2025, he anchored the Living Lab Alleppey , an eight-year university-local governance initiative training hundreds of students in grounded, real-world sanitation and water governance research and engaging state agencies to scale solutions. Stewardship transferred in 2025 to the Technology and Governance Support Forum (TAGS Forum),co-founded by his former students. His field-immersion pedagogy, developed across national and international schools, trains students as governance researchers embedded in real urban problems. Watch the film.

He has supervised twenty doctoral researchers, forming a sustained university research programme on the governance of water, waste, energy and environmental commons. Doctoral Researchers His externally funded research includes partnerships with IDS Sussex, University of Lausanne, UC Berkeley, Concordia University, University of East Anglia, Kyoto University and the Technical University of Munich, and has received funding from several government and international funders. Research Projects

He began his career as a hydrogeologist before reorienting his work toward the social and political dimensions of resource governance. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the ISS, Erasmus University, Netherlands, and an M.Phil. in Applied Economics from the Centre for Development Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) and Executive Director of SaciWATERs, Hyderabad, where he co-coordinated the Crossing Boundaries programme, a Wageningen University-anchored transdisciplinary water governance initiative across five South Asian academic institutions.

Narayanan was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at UC Berkeley and is an Adjunct Professor at the National Institute for Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He has also been Visiting Faculty at the Universities of Lausanne, Monash, Boston College, Shiv Nadar University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. He has served on government committees of the Union and state governments and currently serves on the boards of several development organisations.