University of Connecticut

Faculty Member, Political Science

Thesis Title: ‘Democracy in the Woods’: The Politics of Institutional Change in India’s Forests

About

Prakash Kashwan is an Assistant Professor in the area of Comparative Environmental Policy and Politics. His research focuses on the policies and politics of environment and development in the contexts of widespread power asymmetries. He combines theories of institutional analysis, common property, and power.

Prakash’s research builds on his long-standing engagement with questions of resource rights and the conflicts over natural resource management in South Asia. He is currently working on developing a political economy of institutions approach to explain and theorize institutional change in India’s forest property rights. He is also developing a research agenda focusing on the politics of international environmental policy tools related to climate change, and the causal structures of vulnerability to climate change.

Prakash teaches courses on the politics of environment and development, research methods, and introduction to non-Western politics.

Prakash's doctoral dissertation titled ‘Democracy in the Woods’: Property Rights in India’s Forests and Forestlands, explored how social and political institutions (i.e. the rules, norms, and conventions in use), and regional political contexts, mediate the implementation of policy reforms concerning forest property rights in Western India. This project employed a mixed methods research design to study the ongoing policy reforms that provide for simultaneous recognition of private rights in parcels of forestlands under cultivation prior to the year 2005 as well as the collective rights of communities to protect and manage village forests as commons.

The research opportunities offered by these ongoing reforms has allowed Prakash to investigate questions regarding the various intersections of environment, development, and politics.

More broadly, Prakash’s research interests reside in understanding the politics of and processes unleashed by national and international policies on questions of environment and development. 

Prakash is a methodological pluralist in so far as he combines cross-sectional statistical analysis and case studies with institutional and political ethnography.

Prakash’s research and academic endeavors  are closely related to his prior professional experience. Between his first graduate degree in Forestry Management in 1999 and joining the School of Public & Environmental Affairs in the graduate school at IU in 2005, he had an intense engagement with natural resource management programs in South Asia. This included working closely with adivasi (~indigenous) communities in Western India as they are part of civil society attempts at putting in place local institutional arrangements as well as intra- and inter-community conflict resolution mechanisms. During 2003-2004 Prakash was involved in policy and program analysis in the capacity of a Program Associate in the Environment & Development Program at the Ford Foundation’s South Asia office in New Delhi. Subsequently, he also had the opportunity of working with social movements involved in mass mobilization aimed at securing citizen rights to land and other natural resources.

Prakash continues to engage in international and national environmental policy debates, including Conservation policies, Carbon Forestry through CDM/REDD+, India’s Forest Rights Act, and Rights-based legislation in general. He is also associated with a number of civil society organizations in India and the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Research Program in the USA.

Prakash keenly looks forward to collaborating with fellow academics. 

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