CSEAS Indonesia

Profile Okitasari Mahesti

Okitasari Photo

Areas of expertise

  • Collaborative planning
  • Environmental governance
  • Policy monitoring and evaluation

Research interests

Working as an urban planner since 2006, Mahesti is particularly interested in understanding institutional architecture and how effective urban policies are identified in response to the shortcomings in bridging the gap between social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Her current works include assessing multilevel environmental governance in developing countries after the 2030 Agenda, researching gaps and opportunities in linking green building and sustainable housing policies and practices, and developing multi-stakeholder partnerships for SDGs in the small-medium sized countries.

Biographical Statement

Mahesti Okitasari is a Research Associate at United Nations University (UNU) Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability. She joined the Institute in 2014. Prior to joining UNU, she has several years of research and consulting experience on disaster management, regional planning, and housing policies in Indonesia.

Mahesti holds a PhD in urban planning at University of Tokyo.  Her dissertation addressed collaborative governance in the Indonesian metropolitan regions, deliberately identified the institutional implication of the decentralized governance system and how collaborative metropolitan governance should be constructed to provide better public infrastructure. She was a JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow with a postdoctoral research aimed at exploring the ways in which environmental policies at the global and national levels are translated into local development planning, using the development and application of green economy policies in Indonesia as a case study.

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