Arun Agrawal

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. His Ph.D. work involved following Indian shepherds in the Himalayas to better understand how those communities managed commonly held resources. As of January 2025, Agrawal is the inaugural director of the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative at the University of Notre Dame.

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".

Publications Agrawal's work has been published in journals such as Science, Conservation Biology, World Development, and PNAS. In a publication in Nature, Agrawal explores the positive side of disaster in his case study of a 1998 hurricane in Honduras. According to Agrawal, natural disasters like this set the stage for alternative social trajectories.

Books Agrawal's best known book is Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects, published in 2005.

Previously published books included Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community Among a Migrant Pastoral People, (1999) and Decentralization in Nepal: A Comparative Analysis (1998). "This book (Environmentality) aims to promote Arun Agrawal's own neologism - "environmentality" ... This book, too, has hidden its worthwhile arguments in thickets of verbal profusion, which make it hard to see the teak for the forest."--The Times Higher Education

Books edited 2001: Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations and Rule in India. Duke University Press, Durham, 2001: Social Nature: Resources, Representations and Rule in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001: Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender, and the State in Community-Based Conservation. Rutgers University Press, Piscataway, 2003: Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto,