Ashwini Chhatre

Indian School of Business | ISB · Department of Economics and Public Policy

Significance Substantial growth in food production has occurred from a narrowing diversity of crops over the last 50 y. Agricultural policies have largely focused on the single objective of maximizing production with less attention given to nutrition, climate, and environment. Decisions about sustainable food systems require quantifying and assessi...

Forest restoration occupies centre stage in global conversations about carbon removal and biodiversity conservation, but recent research rarely acknowledges social dimensions or environmental justice implications related to its implementation. We find that 294.5 million people live on tropical forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South...

Scientists, corporations, mystics, and movie stars have convinced policymakers around the world that a massive campaign to plant trees should be an essential element of global climate policy. Public dialogue has emphasized potential benefits of tree planting while downplaying pitfalls and limitations that are well established by social and ecologic...

Tropical and subtropical plantation agriculture has been shown to be compatible with the conservation of biodiversity, but the specific practices, conditions, and farmer strategies associated with such diversity remain poorly understood. In the ecologically rich region of India’s Western Ghats, specifically, farm-scale tree species diversity is a k...

COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerability of our economies to shocks, and it has laid bare deep inequalities in our society that threaten to derail the Sustainable Development Goals. Governments around the world are looking for recovery options that deliver new jobs and businesses. Few sectors link job creation so closely to sustainable green producti...

Forest landscape restoration has emerged as a key strategy to sequester atmospheric carbon and conserve biodiversity while providing livelihood co-benefits for indigenous peoples and local communities. Using a dataset of 314 forest commons in human-dominated landscapes in 15 tropical countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, we examine the relat...

India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat, with more than 40% increase in production since 2000. Increasing temperatures raise concerns about wheat’s sensitivity to heat. Traditionally-grown sorghum is an alternative rabi (winter season) cereal, but area under sorghum production has declined more than 20% since 2000. We examine sensitiv...

Support for rural livelihoods to adapt to climate change is a top policy priority around the world. We advance the concept of “self-organized adaptation” to analyze how long-term pathways of transformation come about as the organic outcome of farmers’ incremental and continuous responses to climate and other challenges. Through an analysis of four...

Diverse anthropogenic activities are changing our natural environment, with important implications for human health. Successfully managing their impacts requires an understanding of the compounding hazards resulting from multi-faceted environmental changes. Here, we propose a human-environment systems lens comprising public health, climate, air qua...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented disruption to lives and livelihoods around the world. These disruptions have brought into sharp focus experiences of vulnerability but also, at times, evidence of resilience as people and institutions gear up to respond to the crisis. Drawing on intensive qualitative enquiry in 16 villages of H...

Scientists, corporations, mystics, and movie stars have convinced policymakers around the world that a massive campaign to plant trees should be an essential element of global climate policy. Public dialogue has emphasized potential benefits of tree planting while downplaying pitfalls and limitations that are well established by social and ecologic...

Forest transition theory proposes pathways that countries might follow to experience forest recovery, but countries currently undergoing forest transition do so in a global context fundamentally different from what it was just 50 years ago. Our study analyzes China's ongoing forest transition to extend forest transition theory in three ways. First,...

Fluctuations in temperature and precipitation influence crop productivity across the planet. With episodes of extreme climate becoming increasingly frequent, buffering crop production against these stresses is a critical aspect of climate adaptation. In India, where grain production and diets are closely linked, national food supply is sensitive to...

Background: India has made important strides in reducing nutritional deficiencies over the past several decades. However, for micronutrients such as zinc, previous studies have suggested a worsening situation, contrary to most other dietary indicators. Adding to this burden, higher carbon dioxide (CO2) levels of 550 ppm, projected to potentially o...

Background: Production of rice and wheat increased dramatically in India over the past decades, with reduced proportion of coarse cereals in the food supply. Objective: We assess impacts of changes in cereal consumption in India on intake of iron and other micronutrients and whether increased consumption of coarse cereals could help alleviate an...

Humanity faces the grand challenge of feeding a growing, more affluent population in the coming decades while reducing the environmental burden of agriculture. Approaches that integrate food security and environmental goals offer promise for achieving a more sustainable global food system, yet little work has been done to link potential solutions w...

Current forest recovery efforts in developing countries are different from previous efforts in developed countries, especially since the rise of economic globalization in the 1980s. Therefore, forest transition theory should now consider factors relating to industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. While previous studies have mainly focus...

The overwhelming emphasis on ‘user committees’ under decentralized forestry management in recent times may further reinforce the segmentation of forest governance space regarding management strategies. This segmentation has appeared in the form of artificial boundaries such as “state-managed,” “community-managed, “private concessions” etc. Each of...

Mountains are one of the last refuges of biodiversity worldwide. As the global discourse on nature conservation becomes prominent within sustainability debates and local populations continue to be blamed for environmental destruction, projected territorial expansion of protected areas will likely lead to high levels of conflict and contestation aro...

Globally, protected areas have long been the corner stone of biodiversity conservation efforts. In India's Western Ghats, small and isolated protected areas are embedded in a matrix of multiple land-uses, most of which include agroforests. These agroforests are being increasingly recognized for their supplementary role in conserving wildlife. We ex...

The overwhelming emphasis on ‘user committees’ under decentralized forestry management in recent times may further reinforce the segmentation of forest governance space in terms of management strategies. This segmentation has appeared in the form of artificial boundaries such as “state-managed”, “community-managed, “private concessions” etc. Each o...

The narrow dependence on paddy and wheat cultivation along with incentives such as free electricity and water has resulted in overuse of pumps and significant depletion of ground water resources in Punjab. Stagnating yields and soil degradation due to intensive cropping pose a significant threat to long-term agricultural productivity in the state....

It is commonly acknowledged that the world’s rural poor are vulnerable to loss and suffering from global climatic change, but there remains disagreement about how vulnerability should be defined and measured. In this paper, we advance the “profile approach” to vulnerability analysis, illustrated through a cluster analysis of livelihoods and assets...

We used a quasi-experimental research design to study the extent of motivational crowding in a recent sustainable development intervention in northern India. The project provided participants with both private and communal material benefits to enhance their incomes, and environmental and social information to inculcate pro-environmental motivations...

Though human-modified tropical landscapes are increasingly well studied, the processes that influence and govern biodiversity outcomes, especially in commodity production landscapes (e.g. coffee, rubber, arecanut), remain poorly understood. A review of the existing literature reveals that research in general focuses on individual components of a ca...

Forest patches, small and large, have been an important feature of human-domination landscapes in the tropics. Ranging in size from a few hectares to a few thousand, these forests serve as refugia for species of conservation concern, perform important ecological functions, while also supporting rural livelihoods. This presentation uses field data f...

Water is at the core of the most difficult sustainability challenges facing humans in the modern era, involving feedbacks across multiple scales, sectors, and agents. We suggest that a transformative new discipline is necessary to address the many and varied water-related challenges in the Anthropocene. Specifically, we propose socio-hydrology as a...

Vibrant protests against restrictions imposed by the Dhauladhar Wildlife Sanctuary (DWLS) in Himachal Pradesh, India have galvanized area residents to protect local forests. In this paper, we examine how local opposition has become entangled with environmental values and practice, culminating in the decision of a women’s group to embark on a local...

This paper reviews and synthesizes the published literature on decentralization of renewable resources and development interventions to identify four key lessons for future adaptation planning at the national level. After presenting an analysis of why studies of decentralization reforms are relevant to adaptation planning, the paper examines priori...

We provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on social safeguards and co-benefits in REDD+ with a focus on debates on: first, tenure security, and second, effective participation of local communities. Scholars have explored both proximate and long-term co-benefits of REDD+ interventions, with an emerging trend that links safeguards to improved soci...

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) policies, projects, and interventions are among the most prominent of recent attempts to mitigate climate change. Because REDD+ projects focus on forests, they simultaneously affect socioeconomic and ecological outcomes at local, subnational, national, regional, and global levels....

Causal pathways to achieve social and ecological benefits from forests are unclear, because there are few systematic multicountry empirical analyses that identify important factors and their complex relationships with social and ecological outcomes. This study examines biodiversity conservation and forest-based livelihood outcomes using a data set...

This paper contributes to fertile debates in environmental social sciences on the uses of and potential synergies between qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches for theory development and validation. Relying on extensive fieldwork on local forest governance in India, and using a dataset on 205 forest commons, we propose a methodological...

Strict protected areas are a critical component in global biodiversity conservation, but the future of biodiversity conservation may well depend upon the ability to experiment successfully with a range of institutional forms, including those that permit human use. Here, we focus on forest commons in human-dominated landscapes and their role in biod...

Forests provide multiple benefits at local to global scales. These include the global public good of carbon sequestration and local and national level contributions to livelihoods for more than half a billion users. Forest commons are a particularly important class of forests generating these multiple benefits. Institutional arrangements to govern...

This article examines the relationship between local enforcement and forests used as commons. It uses a unique multicountry dataset, created over the past 15 years by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program. Drawing on original enforcement and forest commons data from 9 countries, we find that higher levels of local e...

Major features of contemporary forest governance include decentralization of forest management, logging concessions in publicly owned commercially valuable forests, and timber certification, primarily in temperate forests. Although a majority of forests continue to be owned formally by governments, the effectiveness of forest governance is increasi...

"What are the democracy effects of decentralisation reforms and projects? Most developing countries have launched decentralisation reforms for the purpose of improving service delivery, local development and management. In these reforms and projects, however, governments, international development agencies and large non-governmental organisations (...

"New institutions created through decentralisation policies around the world, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are often lacking in substantive democratic content. New policies for decentralised natural resource management have transferred powers to a range of local authorities, including private associations, customary authorities and non-governmenta...

This article contributes to the literature on collective action around environmental co-governance by statistically analyzing original data on the experiences of 95 communities in the Indian Himalayas. We compare the performance of co-governance versus indigenous governance institutions, taking into account the causal influence of five classes of i...

"New institutions created through decentralization policies around the world, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are often lacking in substantive democratic content. New policies for decentralized natural resource management have transferred powers to a range of local authorities, including private associations, customary authorities, and NGOs. Scholars...

This article explores the interacting politics of development and conservation and the contradiction between conservation and democracy through the specific experiences in the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), India. Unravelling the connections between the local, regional, national and the global, in the sphere of politics, conservation, and de...

In the past two decades, scholarship on resource use and management has emphasized the key role of institutions, communities, and socio-economic factors. Although much of this writing acknowledges the importance of a large number of different causal variables and processes, knowledge about the magnitude, relative contribution, and even direction of...

There seems to be a worldwide lack of political will for conservation that leads, inevitably, to an undermining of conservation policy. This is a standard complaint but one that has received little academic attention. In an attempt to better understand the gap between conservation policy and practice, we examined conservation policies and practice...

"Forests of the Western Himalayas, particularly the hill districts of colonial Punjab in India, became sites of intense negotiations over issues of demarcation of state property and definition of user rights in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even as the debates over the Indian Forest Act came to a close. In implementing newfound powers...

The program of People's Biodiversity Registers (PBR) is an attempt to pro- mote folk ecological knowledge and wisdom in two ways: by devising more formal means for their maintenance, and by creating new contexts for their continued practice. PBRs document folk ecological knowledge and practices involving the use of natural resources, with the help...

1. ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT I still vividly recollect a meeting of our garden city's elite committed to the cause of nature conservation on an evening twenty years ago. We were sitting on a lawn in one of the poshest localities of the city, and had two items on our agenda. One was the plight of elephants which move right up to the outskirts of B...

Dissertation This dissertation explores the effects of democratic competition among political parties in India on natural resources and the ability of local communities to cooperate for natural resource management. A significant number of decentralization policies in developing countries depend for their success on local collective action for the p...

"Kangra district in the western Himalayas has been witness to a succession of institutional arrangements between the people and the state for the management of forests in the last 150 years. This history has serious implications for the sustainability of the current efforts at creating village-level institutions for the co- management of forests. "...

"Agrarian tensions between landowners and tenants in colonial Punjab escalated steadily through the early decades of the 20th century, even as the colonial state struggled to address the rising threat of soil erosion from the sub-montane tracts to the growing irrigation economy. Coercive strategies for control of erosion were thwarted by 'illegible...