Faculty
Ashwini Chhatre
- Office Address: 232 Davenport Hall
- Office Telephone: 217-244-3485
- E-mail: achhatre@illinois.edu
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am an Indian citizen, male, 40 years old, and have only been in the US for eight-and-a-half years. Five of those were spent in Graduate School at Duke University, where I was awarded a Ph.D. in Political Science. I was the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University in 2006-07, before coming to UIUC. Between my BA in Economics from University of Delhi in 1990 and the start of my PhD at Duke, I spent 11 years working in different parts of India, mostly as a community organizer and social activist working on issues related to natural resources like land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and longstanding engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that my interests will never be confined to a single discipline!
Research is an integral part of being a social activist, at least a well-informed one, and my research experience started well before I joined graduate school. I had the good fortune of collaborating with some of the best scholars in India, and I learnt the importance of connecting research to policy and social issues from the beginning. Some of that research experience was published as journal articles, and I also co-authored a book on the politics of conservation and development in India based on my pre-graduate school experience. My main research interests lie in the study of intersection of democratic politics with environment and development, with a more recent focus on climate change vulnerability and adaptation. All my field research has so far been confined to India. I am now collaborating with graduate students in working on Tanzania, and with IFRI researchers in analyzing the joint production of livelihoods and forest-related outcomes in countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ongoing research projects include 1) the long-term political dynamics of redistributive land reforms and their impact on environment and development outcomes at multiple scales, 2) the conceptualization of democracy as the emergent property of complex adaptive networks of public, civic, and market institutions, and its implications for vulnerability and adaptation to climate change 3) institutional drivers of trade-offs and synergies between livelihood benefits, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation from forest commons in human-dominated landscapes, and 4) impact of participation in CBNRM institutions on individual attitudes towards the environment.
Recent Publications:
Book:
Chhatre, Ashwini, and Vasant Saberwal, (2006). Democratizing Nature: Politics, Conservation, and Development in India. Oxford, UK; New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
Articles:
Chhatre, Ashwini, and Arun Agrawal (2009). Synergies and Trade-offs between Carbon Storage and Livelihood Benefits from Forest Commons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:17667-17670.
Perha, Lauren, Hemant Ojha, and Ashwini Chhatre (2009). Community Forestry in Nepal: A Policy Innavation for Local Livelihoods. International Food Policy Research Institute Discussion Paper # 913.
Chhatre, Ashwini, and Arun Agrawal (2008). Forest Commons and Local Enforcement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(36): 13286-13291.
Agrawal, Arun, Ashwini Chhatre, and Rebecca Hardin (2008). Changing Governance of World’s Forests. Science 320:1460-62.
Chhatre, Ashwini (2008). Political Articulation and Accountability in Decentralization: Theory and Evidence from India. Conservation and Society 6(1): 12-21 .
Ribot, Jesse, Ashwini Chhatre, and Tomila Lankina (2008). Institutional Choice and Recognition in the Formation and Consolidation of Local Democracy. Conservation and Society 6(1): 1-11.
Agrawal, Arun, and Ashwini Chhatre (2007). Institutions, Co-Governance, and Forests in the Indian Himalayas. Comparative Studies in International Development 42(1-2): 67-86.
Chhatre, Ashwini, and Vasant Saberwal, (2006). Democracy, Development, and (Re)-Visions of Nature: Rural Conflicts in the Western Himalayas. Journal of Peasant Studies 33(4): 687:706.
Agrawal, Arun, and Ashwini Chhatre, (2006). Explaining Success on the Commons: Community Forest Governance in the Indian Himalayas. World Development 34(1): 149-166.