Ashwini Chhatre, Senior Research Fellow

Ashwini Chhatre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with research interests broadly centered on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between democratization, economic development, and environmental governance. Ashwini has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University and spent 11 years working with local communities and social movements on democratic governance of natural resources in India. During 2006-07, Ashwini was the Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science, Harvard University. Ongoing research projects include 1) the long-term political dynamics of redistributive land reforms and their impact on social, economic, political, and ecological 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 environmental decentralization on individual attitudes towards the environment. Ashwini has co-authored one book and published articles in Science, PNAS, Conservation Biology, World Development, and other journals.