Lejano, Raul
Raul Lejano
Dr. Raul Lejano is a professor at New York University specializing in public policy, environment, and collective action. His research involves understanding people’s deep engagements with community and environment, and how we might design policies and institutions from a relational perspective. He is also involved in projects that center on increasing resilience in vulnerable communities in both developing and developed countries, to risks from extreme weather events and environmental health risks. His research informs strategies for reforming environmental governance around an ethic of care. Dr. Lejano’s most recent work includes a book on collective action “Caring, Empathy, and the Commons: A Relational Theory of Collective Action” and policy studies “Relationality: The Inner Life of Public Policy”, both with Cambridge University Press.
Lejano, Raul. 2023. Caring, Empathy, and the Commons: A Relational Theory of Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.
Lejano, Raul and Kan, Wing Shan 2022. Relationality: The Inner Life of Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (online, open-access)
Lejano, R., M. Rahman, and L. Kabir 2020. Risk communication for empowerment: Interventions in a Rohingya refugee settlement, Risk Analysis 40(11): 2360-2372 https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13541.
Lejano, R. P., Rahman, M. S., Kabir, L., & Urrutia, I. 2022. Perspectives from the field: Evaluation of a relational model of risk communication in the context of extreme weather, Climate Risk Management. 37, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2022.100444.
Lejano, R., Casas, E., Pormon, M. and J. Yanger 2020. Teaching to the nth: Narrative knowledge and the relational model of risk communication, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101720.
Dr. Raul Perez Lejano was born in 1981 and grew up in the Philippines. He attended the University of the Philippines, where he graduated cum laude in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He pursued his graduate degrees in the U.S. and earned a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of California - Berkeley in 1986. Dr. Lejano continued to a doctoral program at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), earning a Doctor of Environmental Science and Engineering with a concentration in risk analysis in 1992. In 1998, he completed his Ph.D. in environmental health sciences from UCLA with a concentration in environmental decisions and games. During his doctoral studies, he worked with the economic Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley to analyze collective action problems.
Dr. Lejano is a public policy, environment, and collective action scholar. He is heavily involved in understanding people’s deep engagements with the community and environment. His work uses a relational perspective to design policy and institutions.
From 2000 to 2002, Dr. Lejano was a visiting assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Environmental Policy Group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
In 2002, Dr. Lejano returned to California as an associate professor in the Planning, Policy, and Design Department at the University of California- Irvine. While at UC Irvine, Dr. Lejano published his first book, Frameworks for Policy Analysis: Merging Text and Context, in 2006.
From 2012 to 2013, Dr. Lejano was an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He then returned to the U.S. in 2014 to be an Associate Professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He teaches environmental policy and education. In 2018, Dr. Lejano was promoted to full professor.
Dr. Lejano’s work addresses improving climate resilience for communities vulnerable to environmental health risks and extreme weather. He uses climate justice and urban sustainability as the guiding frameworks for his work. His research provides strategies to change environmental governance around an ethic of care. He conducts fieldwork with community-based organizations such as Communities for a Better Environment, Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Centre, URPAVV, and SCOPE. Dr. Lejano’s current projects include studying extreme weather adaptation in the Phillipines and Bangladesh. He has worked with a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh to lead empowerment workshops about climate adaptation. Dr. Lejano’s research projects also include building VR simulations to study flood risk communication and enacting a relational model of risk communication (NYU).
In an article by NYU, Dr. Lejano shares, “For the last five years, I’ve been working with my colleagues on risk communication for extreme weather in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and New York. All of these places are vulnerable to storm surges of increasing frequency and magnitude. In Bangladesh, through the support of the World Bank, we’ve been working with the Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP), a world-renowned disaster prevention initiative program” (Lejano, 2019).
Dr. Lejano’s work has far-reaching impacts globally. In 2020, Dr. Lejano co-authored The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science with Shondel Nero. This book discusses how discourse deconstructs climate and fosters climate change denial and how modernist climate discourse can alienate the Global South.
His most recent book, Caring, Empathy, and the Commons: A Relational Theory of Collective Action, came out in August 2023.
Dr. Lejano has had a lot of mentors from his early academic endeavors. Most notably, Lloyd Shapley was an important mentor to Dr. Lejano from their work together on collective action problems.
At NYU Steinhardt, Dr. Lejano strongly advocates for community members, both residents and students. He has mentored many students throughout his career and many other residents through his community-based climate resiliency projects.
NYU. 2023. Raul P. Lejano. Retrieved July 25, 2023, from https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/raul-p-lejano.
NYU. (2019, November 19). Helping Refugees Adapt to Climate Change: An Interview with Professor Raul Lejano. Retrieved July 25, 2023 from https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/helping-refugees-adapt-climate-change-in….
Raul Lejano. n.d. Home [LinkedIn Page]. LinkedIn. Retrieved July 25, 2023 from https://www.linkedin.com/in/raul-lejano-6b1691a5/