Born in 1961, Ashish is a founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh (https://kalpavriksh.org), has a Masters in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, and has been an active member of several social movements in India as also of governmental committees. He has been Lecturer at Indian Institute of Public Administration, and guest faculty in several universities including as Mellon Fellow at Bowdoin College, USA and Professor of Practice at National Law School & University, Bengaluru, India.

Ashish coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process (https://kalpavriksh.org/our-work/conservation-livelihoods/nbsap/), and has served on boards of Greenpeace International and India, Indian Society of Ecological Economics, World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN Commission on Social, Economic and Environmental Policy, Bombay Natural History Society, and Centre for Pastoralism. He helped establish the IUCN Strategic Direction on Governance, Equity, Communities, and Livelihoods (TILCEPA) and the ICCA Consortium (www.iccaconsortium.org). He is a founding member of Global Sustainability University (https://our-global-u.org/oguorg/en/), a member of Global Working Group Beyond Development (https://beyonddevelopment.net), and of the Global Commission for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative (https://sacredheadwaters.org). He is a judge on the International Tribunal on Rights of Nature.

Ashish has been a member of Indian government committees on National Wildlife Action Plan, Biological Diversity Act, Environmental Appraisal of River Valley Projects, and Implementation of Forest Rights Act. He initiated the Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) process to network development alternatives in India, a global dialogue process and website on Radical Ecological Democracy (www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org), and global processes of bringing various alternatives together, Global Tapestry of Alternatives (www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org) and Adelante (https://adelante.global). He also initiated PeDAGoG, the Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group (https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/pedagog). He was co-coordinator of the global project ‘Academic-Activist Co-generation of Knowledge on Environmental Justice (http://acknowlej.org).

He has (co)authored or (co)edited over 30 books, including Protected Area Governance and Management (Australian National University Press), People and Protected Areas in India: Towards Participatory Conservation (Sage Publications), Birds in our Lives (Orient Blackswan), Sharing Power (Earthscan), Churning the Earth (Penguin India), Alternative Futures: India Unshackled (Authors UpFront), and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika), and over 700 articles including in journals like Development, Futures, Economic and Political Weekly, Oryx, Scientific American, and Sustainability Science, and newspapers/magazines like The Guardian, The Hindu, Indian Express, Times of India, Hindustan Times, Frontline, Wall Street International Magazine, Outlook and Outlook Traveller. He has been on the Editorial Advisory Board of Oryx and other journals or magazines.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashish_Kothari