I am an interdisciplinary environmental researcher with over eight years of experience in field-based, mixed-methods research in environmental governance, natural resource management, environmental policy and climate adaptation. I recently graduated with a PhD in Sustainability from Arizona State University.
My research examines how and why people engage in collective action to address shared sustainability challenges, and how social, political, and institutional contexts shape these responses. I am particularly interested in how evolving social and political institutions mediate collective responses to social dilemmas like natural resource management and climate change. My dissertation, Negotiating the Commons in Transition: Urbanization and the Dynamics of Governance in India’s Groundwater Systems, supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (NSF-DDRI) Grant, examines how urbanization transforms the social and institutional conditions under which communities make groundwater provisioning, appropriation and management decisions. Drawing on behavioral economics, political ecology and development studies, I combine quantitative and qualitative methods including econometric models, spatial statistics and content analysis methods to study groundwater governance across the rural-urban continuum.
I am currently exploring postdoctoral and research opportunities that allow me to build on this work while expanding my research on collective action, environmental governance, and sustainability transitions.
