Rate My Professor Douglas Hill

Associate Professor Douglas Hill serves in the School of Geography at the University of Otago, holding the position of Associate Professor and acting as Coordinator of the Master of International Development and Planning programme. He obtained his BA (Hons) from the Australian National University and PhD from Curtin University. His academic interests lie in development studies with a focus on South Asia, particularly India, including geopolitics and transboundary water resources, migrant labour, ports, labour restructuring and maritime trade, rural development and participatory governance in West Bengal, and urban transformation and socio-spatial segregation in India's megacities. Additional research areas encompass energy systems resilience as applied to Nepal, low-carbon economy transitions in Asia and New Zealand, immigrant settlement in small towns, and sustainable development challenges amid climate change.

Hill has produced a substantial body of scholarly work. Key publications include the book 'Transboundary Water Cooperation over the Brahmaputra River: Legal Political Economy Analysis of Current and Future Potential Cooperation' (2017), contributions to 'The Indian Media Economy' (2017), 'Impacts of the delay in construction of a large scale hydropower project on potential displacees' (2017), 'Earthquakes, blockades and energy crises: A conceptual framework for energy systems resilience applied to Nepal' (2020, with Underwood and Lamichhane), 'Multi-track water diplomacy: current and potential future cooperation over the Brahmaputra River Basin' (2020), and 'Settling in New Zealand’s Small Towns: Experiences of Minority Ethnic Immigrants' (2023, with Alam, Nel, and Bulloch). He has undertaken visiting positions at the University of Essex (UK), the Hague Institute for Global Justice (Netherlands), Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (Germany), University of Heidelberg (Germany), and Shiv Nadar University (India), and provided consultancy services to the World Bank and the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia. Hill teaches courses such as ENVI 111 Environment and Society, GEOG 102 Introduction to Human Geography, GEOG 228/328 Uneven Development in Contemporary India, GEOG 472 Contemporary Developments in Environmental Management, and GEOG 473 Contemporary Geographies of South Asia. He supervises doctoral and master's theses on development, environmental management, and related topics.