Anjal Prakash is an Clinical Associate Professor (Research) and Research Director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP), at the Indian School of Business (ISB). An experienced researcher and academic, Professor Prakash’s work primarily focuses on water and climate change, urban resilience, and gender and social inclusion issues in South Asia.

Professor Prakash has worked in various capacities across different organisations in his field, including as Associate Professor at TERI School of Advanced Studies, and as the Coordinator of the Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience (HI-AWARE) Research programme on glacier- and snowpack-dependent river basins at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu, Nepal. He has also been actively involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he served as Coordinating Lead Author for the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC), published in 2019, and as Lead Author in working group II of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report.

Professor Prakash holds a Master's degree in Social Work (Urban and Rural Community Development) from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India (1997), and a Doctorate in Social and Environmental Sciences from Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands (2005). He has authored several books on water resource policies, gender issues, and peri-urban water security, and has co-edited several journal issues on related topics. Professor Prakash serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Environment and Urbanization Asia, Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, Springer Nature’s SN Business and Economics and PLOS Climate. He is Associate Editor of Current Research in Environmental Sustainability and Nature’s Urban Sustainability.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.