Arun Agrawal teaches comparative politics at Yale University. The empirical focus of his work is forest-using communities and pastoralists in India and Nepal. He has also written on narrative formations around development, environmental conservation, community, and indigenous knowledge, and on the theoretical aspects of institutions and common property. He has written for journals including Development and Change, Human Ecology, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Peace and Change, and World Development. His book regarding nomadic shepherds in India, Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant People is forthcoming from Duke and Oxford University Presses.
Abwoli Y. Banana is a senior Lecturer in the Department of Forestry, Makerere University and a Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). He has a bachelor of science degree in Forestry from Makerere University (1977), a master of science degree in Wood Science and Technology from the University of California, Berkeley (1979), and he holds a Ph.D. from the Australian National University, Canberra (1985). He is co-leader of the Uganda Forestry Resources and Institutions Center (UFRIC), which is studying the relationship between local communities and their forests in Uganda.
C. Dustin Becker received her master of science degree from Yale and Ph.D. from Alberta. She is currently a research associate at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. She is continuing her work regarding local-level management of natural resources in Ecuador by, among other things, studying land tenure issues among local-level farmers and examining the moisture-trapping characteristics of coastal forests.
Clark Gibson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, and a Research Associate with the university's Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC). A large portion of his research explores the institutions and politics of natural resources, especially forest and wildlife resources in Africa and Latin America, at both local and national levels. His work has appeared in journals such as Human Ecology, Comparative Politics, and World Development. His forthcoming book Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (Cambridge University Press) examines the politics of wildlife management at multiple levels in Zambia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.
William Gombya-Ssembajjwe has a master of science degree from the Australian National University and Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Bangor. He is the leader of the Uganda Forestry Resources and Institutions Center at Makerere University and a Senior Lecturer in the Forestry Department there.
Rosario Leon is a sociologist at the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Economica y Social (CERES) in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As the facilitator of the FTPP in Bolivia, she has been working with IFRI since 1994.
Margaret A. McKean received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at Duke University, where she teaches environmental politics and policy and Japanese politics. In the last decade, she has been working on the evolution of common property rights and on politics as a struggle over the production of public goods, in Japan and elsewhere. She is currently completing a manuscript on the management of common-pool goods and public goods in conditions of unusual scarcity in Japan. She served as president of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in 1995-1996.
Elinor Ostrom is Co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Governing the Commons (1990) and Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems (1992); coauthor with Larry Schroeder and Susan Wynne of Institutional Incentives and Sustainable Development (1993); and co-author with Roy Gardner and James Walker of Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (1994).
Charles M. Schweik is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at Indiana University. He has a master's degree in Public Administration from Syracuse University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. His dissertation, entitled "The Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Forest Resources and Institutions," relates human incentive structures and human activities to forest condition measures collected both in the field and through temporal sets of Landsat multispectral satellite images. Results of his recent research appear in Mountain Research and Development and The Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal.
George Varughese is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at Indiana University. He has a master's degree in Business Administration and an undergraduate degree in Life Sciences. He is currently researching the organization of collective action for the governance and management of forest resources in Nepal from an institutional analysis perspective. He is also interested in the institutional design of parterships between local communities and government officials for the governance and management of natural resources. He has recently co-edited People and Participation in Sustainable Development: Understanding the Dynamics of Natural Resource Systems with Ganesh Shivakoti, Elinor Ostrom, Ashutosh Shukla, and Ganesh Thapa.
Mary Beth Wertime served as the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program coordinator and a research associate at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis until 1996. She has a master's degree in Public Administration from American University. She has worked in Cameroon and Mali on agro-forestry program planning and evaluation, and in Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and countries in Latin America over the past 15 years.
