Political ecology of commodity agroforests and tropical biodiversity

By Paul Robbins, Ashwini Chhatre, Krithi Karanth
Conservation Letters | March 2015

DOI

doi.org/10.1111/conl.12169

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Citation

Robbins, Paul., Chhatre, Ashwini., Karanth, Krithi. Political ecology of commodity agroforests and tropical biodiversity Conservation Letters doi.org/10.1111/conl.12169.

Conservation Letters, 2015

Abstract

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 cascading set of relationships from political and economic forces, to producer decisions, to agroforestry structure, to habitat and diversity. The linkages between these components remains underdeveloped; efforts to unite the full “chain of explanation” remains elusive, making it difficult to form firm claims or testable hypotheses about how the ecology and biodiversity of such commodity systems are determined. To form more robust hypotheses about such relationships would require more integrative team efforts than heretofore have been common. Our review suggests that though some important relationships are well-understood, and some emerging policy emphases can be identified, policy-relevant science is still on the horizon in this frontier area.

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.

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Ashwini Chhatre