This chapter maps the emergence and development of urban environmental history (UEH) in South Asia and the lessons it offers to understand and analyze pertinent questions of urban environmental governance in recent times. However, it acknowledges the limits of historical research (especially due to its reliance on the archival methodology) and points to the need to complement UEH with other critical social sciences. Towards this end, we present a detailed overview of urban political ecology (UPE), particularly recent poststructuralist approaches, which use an array of qualitative research methods to analyze governance scenarios in situated contexts. With South Asia as the empirical context, we finally establish our argument regarding the significance of integrating and cross-fertilizing historical and political ecological perspectives to convey larger and deeper narratives of urban environmental governance.