Team

Michael Cox
Co-founder, co-host

Michael Cox is a professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. He studies and teaches about the commons, mostly within the context of local natural resource governance. His primary empirical work has focused on irrigation governance in the Southwest United States and small-scale fisheries and rice farming in the Dominican Republic. He is currently working on a book on environmental property rights.

HitaUnnikrishnan
Co-host

Hita Unnikrishnan is a postdoctoral research associate and British Academy funded Newton International Fellow at the Urban Institute, The University of Sheffield. She is also a visiting faculty at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her research has focused on the changing social-ecological relationships around urban blue and green commons in India over time and their implications for equity and sustainability. She is currently engaged in examining the dynamics of community energy projects in Eastern Africa.

Michael Schoon
Co-host, PECS webinar series

Michael Schoon is an associate professor in Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, focusing on policy and governance in sustainable systems. His research focuses on collaborative environmental governance, assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems ranging from biodiversity conservation to water sharing to fire management to wild horse management. He hosts the PECS webinar series.

Frank van Laerhoven
Co-host, IJC journal series

Frank van Laerhoven works at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Both his teaching and his research revolve around the commons, commoners, and commons scholarship. Since 2007 he has co-edited the International Journal of the Commons (IJC). Since the IJC and the ICP started their partnership, he has been co-leading the podcast’s (IJC) Journal series, which contains interviews with authors of IJC journal articles, providing a direct outlet for academic work on the podcast.

Divya Gupta
Co-host

Divya is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at SUNY Binghamton in New York, USA. Her teaching and scholarship focus on the roles that diverse state and non-state actors play in the process of governance, development, and justice. Divya has been conducting empirical research in India and Nepal, looking at the community-based response to the changes like climate and the pandemic. She is also working with her network of collaborators to study the implementation of contemporary decentralization and rights-based approaches in forest management in the global south.

Praneeta Mudaliar
Blog editor

Praneeta Mudaliar is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College in New York, USA. Praneeta’s scholarship and teaching interests revolve around micro and macro-level power dynamics, socio-cultural inequalities, and actor interactions in the governance of the commons. She has conducted cross-national empirical research on community-based watershed management in the United States (U.S.) and India, and polycentric fisheries in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Apart from commons research, Praneeta studies pro-environmental behaviors among young adults, climate justice, decolonizing land management in institutes of higher education in the U.S., and the pedagogy of building collective efficacy among students to undertake long-term transformative environmental action.

Dustin Garrick
Co-host

Dustin Garrick is University Research Chair of water and development policy at the University of Waterloo, Canada and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He works at the intersection of science, policy and enterprise, serving as senior advisor to the United Nations and World Bank and as CEO and Founder of Water Cycles Expeditions, a bike touring company and social enterprise striving to build a global network of citizen water scientists examining climate adaptation. His research focuses on the political economy and governance of water and natural resources in the context of development policy and practice. He has a longstanding focus on the institutional diversity of water and environmental markets across a network of observatories and partnerships in Western North America, Australia, East Africa, India, and China. He is currently working on a book on water and environmental markets, and leads a research group, Blue Range Labs, that brings these threads together in a common agenda.

Hatley Post
Producer, Insight Episodes

Hatley Post is a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. She is a double major in Environmental Studies and History interested in environmental governance and the history of environmental degradation and conservation. Hatley produces the Insight Episodes for the In Common Podcast.

Stefan Partelow
Co-founder, co-host

Stefan is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Germany, where he also jointly completed his Ph.D. in 2018 in Political Science at Jacobs University. His research focuses on environmental governance of marine and coastal systems in the global tropics. He is interested in how communities resolve collective action problems through institutional development and change over time. He is also interested in the challenges in doing interdisciplinary research.

Courtney Hammond Wagner
Co-host

Courtney Hammond Wagner is a postdoctoral scholar in the sustainable groundwater program at Water in the West. As an environmental social scientist, Courtney’s research broadly aims to understand how we design incentives, rules and policies to collectively change behavior in water resource dilemmas to improve community well-being and ecological outcomes. At Water in the west, Courtney is working on two aspects of California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) policy process: the mandated use of climate information in groundwater sustainability plans and the role of incentives in farmer groundwater use. This work builds on her previous SGMA research in Yolo County, California to identify the role of farmer social norms and fairness perceptions in the SGMA policy process.