Arun Agrawal
Arun Agrawal (born September 20, 1962) is a political scientist and the Samuel Trask Dana Professor in the School for Environment  and Sustainability (SEAS) at the University of Michigan. Agrawal is the coordinator for the International Forestry Resources and Institutions  network and does research in Africa and South Asia. Agrawal was the editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal World Development from 2013-2021. Agrawal was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. Education
Arun Agrawal was born in Forbesganj, Bihar, India, where he grew up in a middle-class family. Eventually he moved to Patna to live with an aunt, so that he could attend a better school. Agrawal received his BA in History from the University of Delhi in 1983. He received an MBA in Development Administration and Public Policy from the  Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1985. Moving to the United States, he received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University in 1992. His Ph.D. work involved following Indian shepherds in the Himalayas to better understand how those communities managed commonly held resources. Career
Agrawal has taught at the University of Florida (1993-1996), Yale University (1997-2002) and McGill University (2002-2003). In 2003, he began teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he works on issues of environmental politics, governance, and sustainable development. In 2022, Agrawal was chosen to be a co-chair of the Transformative Change Assessment for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The Transformative Change Assessment will address "the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, the determinants of transformative change, and options for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity". 