Profile

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Prakash Kashwan is an interdisciplinary social scientist of global environmental and climate change. His teaching, research, and scholarship focuses on the intersections of environment, development, and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. Kashwan’s academic engagements build on this interdisciplinary background, including a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), a Master’s in Forestry Management), and a Ph. D. in Public Policy awarded under the tutelage of late Professor Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, who was the joint winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Equally important, Kashwan’s research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two-decades-long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre-academia career in international development (1999-2005).

He is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press 2017), which has been reviewed extensively in scholarly journals and popular media. He is the Editor of Climate Justice in India (Cambridge University Press 2022), one of the Editors of the journal Environmental Politics (Taylor & Francis), and co-founder of Climate Justice Network (with Professor Lauren MacLean of Indiana University, Bloomington ). His next book project (on an advanced contract with Oxford University Press), develops a theory of governing for justice and to illustrate these arguments in the context of efforts to realize socially just climate action in the United States.

Kashwan’s research has been cited in national and international media, including the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, Huffington Post, the U.S. National Public Radio (NPR), Scientific American, and, Down to Earth. He has also contributed popular commentaries to the Washington Post, the Conversation, Al Jazeera, BBC Hindi, and the Guardian, among others. He has been a member of the expert group convened by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) for the Scoping of the Assessment of Transformative Change and options for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity. He has been appointed a Senior Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, and a member of the Academic Working Group on International Governance of Climate Engineering convened by the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, Washington D.C. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of journals Earth Systems Governance and Progress in Development Studies. He seeks to serve the broader community of Environmental Studies researchers and scholars in his capacity as the Vice Chair and Program Chair of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Kashwan was a winner of a Young Scientist’s Research Award for 2009 from the International Foundation for Science (IFS), Stockholm. More recently, he was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Research Excellence Program award (2018), the Human Rights Institute’s Faculty Fellowship (2020), and the externally-adjudicated Faculty Fellowship (2021-22) at the UConn Humanities Institute.


Courses Taught

ENVS 111a Environmental & Climate Justice
ENVS 112b Governing the Environmental Commons
ENVS 39b Climate Change, Causes, Impacts, Responses, and Solution