Background:

Harry holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He has previously held positions at the Indian School of Business, La Trobe University and the Australia India Institute based at the University of Melbourne. Harry has been a member of the Focali Secretariat since 2019.

Research focus:

Harry’s research explores the intersection between environmental governance, rural development, and democratic politics in the developing world, with a focus on India.
He has ongoing research interests on:
- decentralization, local democracy, and natural resource governance
- rural livelihoods and social vulnerability in the context of climate change
- drivers of joint human-environmental outcomes in human-dominated landscapes
- the social impacts of afforestation

He is involved in two funded projects:
“Institutional networks and self-organized adaptation: Tracing the democratic architectures of climate response” funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2019-2021 (5.6 million Swedish Kronor, €560,000) as lead investigator (with Forrest Fleischman, Dil Khatri, and Ashwini Chhatre)

"Impacts of Afforestation on Sustainable Rural Livelihoods in India" funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA, 2017-20 ($750,000), project lead Forrest Fleischman, University of Minnesota

Keywords:

Decentralization, community-based natural resource governance, democratic politics, climate change, social vulnerability