Arun Agrawal

Arun Agrawal, PhD, is the Samuel Trask Dana Professor of Governance and Sustainability at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, with a courtesy appointment at the Ford School. Agrawal emphasizes the politics of international development, institutional change, environmental conservation, and sustainability in his research and teaching. He has written critically on indigenous knowledge, community-based conservation, common property, population resources, and environmental identities. Agrawal coordinates the University of Michigan's Collaborating Research Center for the International Forestry Resources and Institutions network. He carries out research in central and east Africa as well as South Asia. His work has appeared in Science, PNAS, Conservation Biology, Development and Change, among other journals. Preceding his work at U-M, Agrawal was educated at Duke University, the Indian Institute of Management, and Delhi University and has held teaching and research positions at Yale, Florida, McGill, Berkeley, and Harvard among other universities.

Educational background

• PhD in political science, Duke University
• MA in political science, Duke University
• MBA, Indian Institute of Management
• BA in history, Delhi University

Professional affiliations

• Coordinator: International Forestry Resources and Institutions Program (2006- Present)
• Member, NSF-IGERT (National Science Foundation-Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) evaluation panel (2010)
• Member, Fellowship selection panel, ACLS (2009-2011)

Recent publications

• Ferraro, P. and A. Agrawal (2021). Synthesizing evidence in sustainability science through harmonized experiments: Community monitoring in common pool resource. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (29).
• Liao, C., Nolte, K., Sullivan, J.A. et al. (2021). Carbon emissions from the global land rush and potential mitigation. Nature Food 2.
• Oldekop, J.,Rasmussen, L.V., Agrawal, A., et al. (2020). Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world Nature Plants 6(12).
• Erbaugh, J.T., Pradhan, N., Adams, J. et al. (2020) Global forest restoration and the importance of prioritizing local communities. Nature Ecology and Evolution 4.
• Newton, P., Kinzer, A.T., Miller, D.C., Oldekop, J.A., Agrawal, A. (2020) The number and spatial distribution of forest-proximate people globally. One Earth, 3 (3).
• Oldekop, Johan A., Sims, Katharine R. E., Karna, Birendra K., Whittingham, Mark J., Agrawal, Arun. 2019. Reductions in deforestation and poverty from decentralized forest management in Nepal. Nature Sustainability.
• Agrawal, A., L. Wollenberg, and L, Persha. 2014. Governing Mitigation in Agriculture-Forest Landscapes. Global Environmental Change. 29: 270-326.
• Agrawal, A. 2005. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Duke University Press; Oxford University Press, Delhi). rpt. 2006.
• Sivaramakrishnan, K. and A. Agrawal. 2003. Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development. Stanford University Press.
• Agrawal, A. 1999. Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People. Durham NC: Duke University Press. (Jointly published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi).