(December 2024 – present)

Biography:

Asmita Kabra is a political ecologist and critical development practitioner with an initial academic training in development economics. She worked from 2010-2024 at Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. She was Professor and former Dean of the School of Human Ecology – one of the first in India to bring together insights from the natural and social sciences to study complex socio-ecological problems of sustainable development and social justice. Earlier, she taught Economics at Ramjas College, University of Delhi from 1995 to 2010.

Her ongoing research focuses on conservation-induced displacement, indigenous and local knowledge systems, just energy transition, land acquisition and displacement, and the political economy of rural development. She has published more than 30 articles and book chapters in highly reputed global and Indian publications. Dr Kabra has worked with international agencies like the World Bank, ADB and IFC to provide consultancy for land governance, just transition, and community-based biodiversity conservation. She has produced two films that showcase dilemmas of conservation and displacement.  She served as Managing Editor of Ecology, Economy and Society – the INSEE Journal during 2021-23, and presently serves as an Associate Editor for the international journal Conservation & Society.

Dr. Kabra is a deeply engaged critical development practitioner, with 25 years of hands-on work with communities living in the semi-arid farm-forest frontier of the Kuno national park in Sheopur, Madhya Pradesh. She is the founder and Managing Trustee of the NGO Samrakshan Trust, established in 1999 to work for socially just biodiversity conservation and sustainable rural livelihoods. She is also the founder and President of Adharshila, an NGO working in Madhya Pradesh for meaningful education of more than 2500 underprivileged rural children. Samrakshan and Adharshila work in areas like soil and water conservation, sustainable agriculture, ecological restoration of degraded farmland, community-led waste management, food security, and an emerging people-centric ecotourism initiative. She is the founder-director of the Conservation and Livelihoods Research Station at Samrakshan Trust. The unique research exposure and learning opportunities of this centre have generated more than 25 postgraduate and doctoral dissertations in the Kuno landscape.

Website: https://asmitakabra.net/

Recent Publications

• Montgomery, Robert A., Asmita Kabra, Thembela Kepe, Stephen Garnett, and Roger Merino (2024). “Re-Centering Social Justice in Conservation Science: Progressive Policies, Methods, and Practices.” Biological Conservation 294: 110600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110600.
• Kabra, Asmita, Budhaditya Das, and Chhavi Bathla (2023). “Indigenous Tree Tenure in the Times of Charismatic Carnivore Conservation: Territoriality and Property in the Forests of Central India.” Political Geography 101: 102841. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102841.
• Kabra, Asmita, and Budhaditya Das (2022). “Aye for the Tiger: Hegemony, Authority, and Volition in India’s Regime of Dispossession for Conservation.” Oxford Development Studies 50, no. 1: 44–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600818.2022.2028134.
• Kabra, Asmita (2019). “Caste in Stone? Exploring Caste and Class Dimensions of Conservation Displacement in Central India”. Journal of Contemporary Asia 50(5): 785-805. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1696877
• Kabra, Asmita, & Sonam Mahalwal. (2018). “The Micropolitics of Dispossession and Resistance: Case Study of a Proposed Dam in Central India”. Development and Change, 50(6): 1509–1530 https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12447