Arun Agrawal

Biography

Arun Agrawal is the Pulte Family Professor of Development Policy at the Keough School of Global Affairs and the inaugural director of the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a core-affiliated faculty member of the Pulte Institute for Global Development. 

Agrawal's research and teaching focus on environmental politics and sustainable development. His work examines the political economy of institutional change, sustainability and conservation and development. He has written on Indigenous knowledge, community-based conservation, common property and commoning, agrarian change and the governance of environment and sustainability. His fieldwork has taken him to more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. His research has found support from both public and private foundations around the world, including the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the United Kingdom’s development cooperation agency and the U.S. Department of Defense. Agrawal's current projects include grants from the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative to examine the effects of demographic and climate change on sociopolitical stability in Africa and a grant from the National Science Foundation to support international undergraduate training.

Agrawal’s work has appeared in Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), American Political Science Review, Current Anthropology and various Nature Portfolio journals among others. He serves as a member of the editorial board of the PNAS. and several other interdisciplinary development and sustainability journals. He earned his doctorate in political science from Duke University and he holds an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He has held teaching and research positions at the University of Michigan; Yale University; University of Florida; McGill University; University of California, Berkeley; Indiana University and Harvard University.

Recent Work

• "When global warming becomes malnutrition: New study links climate change, childhood stunting and local inequality"  (PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• "Synergies between poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation" (Nature Sustainability)
• "The human right to a safe climate" (Nature Sustainability)
• "Supporting researchers’ engagement in international science–policy bodies" (Nature)
• "Mitigation justice" (PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
• "From environmental governance to governance for sustainability" (One Earth)
• "Divergent outcomes of large-scale land transactions in Ethiopia: A quantitative comparative analysis" (Ecological Economics)
• "The role of rural circular migration in shaping weather risk management for smallholder farmers in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh" (Global Environmental Change)
• "Community forest governance and synergies among carbon, biodiversity and livelihoods" (Nature Climate Change)
• "The role of human and social capital in earthquake recovery in Nepal" (Nature Sustainability)
• "Mapping fine-scale socioeconomic inequality using machine learning and remotely sensed data" (PNAS Nexus)

News & Media

• "Notre Dame study links climate change to stunted child growth in Africa" (National Catholic Reporter)
• "Notre Dame experts respond to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas"
• "Vatican, Notre Dame launch academic alliance to find solutions to ecological crises" (National Catholic Reporter)
• "Notre Dame partners with the Vatican's Laudato Si' Center for Higher Education to establish Global Alliance dedicated to integral ecology and global sustainability" (Notre Dame News)
• "Environmental representatives launch ‘Global Alliance’ at Laudato si’ Village" (Vatican News)
• "The world may have another climate pope" (Axios)