People

    • Tariq Banuri

      Tariq Banuri

      Associate Fellow

      Tariq Banuri is the former chairman of the Pakistani Higher Education Commission, an independent, constitutionally established institution, with a mandate to finance, oversee, regulate, and accredit all institutions of higher learning in Pakistan. He is a professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. He previously served as associate director of the U.S.-Pakistan Centers for Advanced Studies in Water at the University of Utah and director of the UN Division for Sustainable Development. Earlier, he had been instrumental in the design of a number of institutions and networks on sustainable development, including the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP), the Asia Centre of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the UN Office of Sustainable Development (UNOSD), the Ring Alliance, the Sustainable Mekong Research Network, the Human Development Foundation of North America, and the Great Transition Initiative.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead (with Paul Raskin, Gilberto Gallopín, Al Hammond, Rob Swart, Robert Kates, and Pablo Gutman)

      Civic Entrepreneurship: A Civil Society Perspective on Sustainable Development, Vol. 1: Global Synthesis (with Adil Najam)

      The Coming Struggle (contribution to GTI Forum "Which Future Are We Living In?")

    • Halina Brown

      Halina Brown

      Associate Fellow

      Halina Brown is Professor Emerita of Environmental Science and Policy at Clark University. She is currently a chairperson of the Citizens Commission on Energy in Newton, Massachusetts, and played a leading role in producing the Newton Climate Action Plan. Her scholarly research has included environmental risk assessment, national and international environmental policy, corporate environmental management, the institutionalization of sustainability reporting, socio-technical transitions, and sustainable consumption. She has served as a chief toxicologist at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, a visiting professor at several universities, and a member of numerous committees of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a co-founder of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Society for Risk Analysis. She received a PhD in chemistry from New York University in 1976.

    • Maurie Cohen

      Maurie Cohen

      Associate Fellow

      Maurie Cohen is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has held prior academic positions at the University of Leeds, Binghamton University (State University of New York), Mansfield College (Oxford University), and Indiana University. Dr. Cohen is a co-founder of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), an international knowledge network comprising academics, policy makers, and practitioners working at the interface of material consumption, sustainable systems innovation, and economic transition. He also serves as the editor of Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy, an open-access e-journal dedicated to the wide dissemination of scholarly research and professional insights on sustainability. His books include Sustainability, The Future of Consumer Society: Prospects for Sustainability in the New Economy, Innovations in Sustainable Consumption: New Economics, Socio-technical Transitions, and Social Practices (with Halina Brown and Philip Vergragt), and Risk in the Modern Age: Social Theory, Science, and Environmental Decision Making. He holds a PhD in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania.

    • Felix Dodds

      Felix Dodds

      Associate Fellow

      Felix Dodds is an independent consultant focusing on stakeholder engagement in the sustainable development process. He was executive director of the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future from 1992 to 2012. He has been active at the UN since 1990, attending the Rio Earth Summit, Habitat II, Rio+5, Beijing+5, Copenhagen+5, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development. He has also participated in all the UN Commissions for Sustainable Development and many UNEP Governing Councils. In 2011, he chaired the 64th UN Department of Public Information NGO Conference on Sustainable Societies Responsive Citizens. He co-chaired the NGO Coalition at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development from 1997 to 2001. He has written or edited nine books, including the recent Only One Earth: the Long Road via Rio to Sustainable Development (2012). He is a member of a number of advisory boards, including the Council of Advisors for the Collaborative Institute for Oceans, Climate and Security, Asia-Europe Foundation - ENVforum Steering Committee, and the Great Transition Initiative.

    • Jayati Ghosh

      Jayati Ghosh

      Jayati Ghosh is a development economist Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She taught economics for more than three decades at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on globalization, international finance, employment patterns in developing countries, and gender and development. She is one of the founders of the Economic Research Foundation in New Dehli, a charitable trust devoted to progressive economic research; Executive Secretary of the International Development Economics Associates, a network of economists critical of the mainstream economic paradigm of neoliberalism; and a member of the United Nations High-level Advisory Board (HLAB) on Economic and Social Affairs. She has consulted for a variety of intergovernmental organizations, including the ILO, UNDP, and UNCTAD. Her published works include the co-edited Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, Demonetisation Decoded, India and the International Economy, Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India, and The Market that Failed: A Decade of Neoliberal Economic Reforms in India.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Development for Whom? (interview)

    • Tim Jackson

      Tim Jackson

      Tim Jackson is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016, he has been director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey in the UK, where he is also Professor of Sustainable Development. From 2004 to 2011, he was Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, where his work culminated in the publication of Prosperity without Growth (2009/2017), which was subsequently translated into 17 foreign languages. His latest book is Post Growth – Life after Capitalism. Jackson received an MA in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario and a PhD in physics from the University of St Andrews. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the Belgian Royal Academy of Science. In addition to his academic work, he is an award-winning dramatist with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC.

    • Giorgos Kallis

      Giorgos Kallis

      Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist, political ecologist, and Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Barcelona. He is the coordinator of the European Network of Political Ecology and editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (2014). His research is motivated by a quest to cross conceptual divides between the social and the natural domains, with particular focus on the political-economic roots of environmental degradation and its uneven distribution along lines of power, income, and class. His current work explores the hypothesis of sustainable degrowth as a solution to the dual economic and ecological crisis. He was previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the Energy and Resources group at UC Berkeley, and he holds a PhD in environmental policy from the University of the Aegean.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      The Degrowth Alternative

      Toward Policy Specificity (contribution to GTI Forum The Population Debate Revisited)

      Full-World Economics (contribution to a forum)

      Marxism and Ecology (contribution to a forum)

      Meaningful Work (contribution to a forum)

      Do Red and Green Mix? (contribution to a forum)

    • Ashish Kothari

      Ashish Kothari

      Ashish Kothari is a founder-member of Kalpavriksh, a civil society organization in India focusing on environment and development issues. He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and is Professor of Practice at National Law School and University (Bengaluru) and guest faculty in several other universities in India and abroad. He coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan, served on Indian government committees to formulate the National Biodiversity Act and National Wildlife Action Plan, and served on boards or steering committees of two IUCN commissions, Greenpeace International & India, and the ICCA Consortium. A long-standing member or supporter of several people’s movements, he helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and Radical Ecological Democracy processes. He is (co)author/(co)editor of several books, including Birds in our Lives, Churning the Earth, Alternative Futures, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Radical Ecological Democracy: A Path Forward for India and Beyond

      A Flowering of Radical Change (contribution to GTI Forum Which Future Are We Living In?

      Honoring the Pluriverse (contribution to GTI Forum An Earth Constitution: Has Its Time Come?)

      Thinking Beyond the Left (contribution to GTI Forum Planetize the Movement!)

      Marxism and Ecology (contribution to a forum)

      Farming for a Small Planet (contribution to a forum)

      Do Red and Green Mix? (contribution to a forum)

      Party Time? (contribution to a forum)

    • Mary Mellor

      Mary Mellor

      Mary Mellor is Emeritus Professor at Northumbria University, where she was founding Chair of the University’s Sustainable Cities Research Institute. She has published extensively on alternative economics integrating socialist, feminist, and green perspectives. In 2017, she received the Bernardo Aguilar Award by the US Society for Ecological Economics in recognition of her contributions to inspiring students through teaching, research, ideas, and mentoring in the field. Her books include Feminism and Ecology, The Future of Money: From Financial Crisis to Public Resource, Debt or Democracy? Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice, and Money: Myths, Truths and Alternatives. She holds a PhD from Newcastle University.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Money for the People

      Public Money for a Public Purpose (contribution to the GTI forum "Universal Basic Income: Has the Time Come?")

      Do Red and Green Mix? (contribution to a forum)

      On Degrowth (contribution to a forum)

    • Frances Moore Lappé

      Frances Moore Lappé

      Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of twenty books, including the three-million-copy Diet for a Small Planet. Her latest is Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies, which dives into the roots of the American disinformation crisis and shares lessons from democracies leading the fight to combat harmful lies and promote truth. She is co-founder of Oakland-based Food First and the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. The recipient of nineteen honorary degrees, she has been a visiting scholar at MIT and U.C. Berkeley and in 1987 received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “Alternative Nobel.”

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Farming for a Small Planet: Agroecology Now

    • Rasigan Maharajh

      Rasigan Maharajh

      Associate Fellow

      Rasigan Maharajh is the founding chief director of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation in the Faculty of Economics and Finance at Tshwane University of Technology, where his research has focused on critiquing the political economy, innovation systems and public policies in the context of the global knowledge commons, economic development, social cohesion, and democratic governance. Prior to his return to academia in 2004, he was Head of Policy at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (1997–2004) and National Coordinator of the Science and Technology Policy Transition Project for South Africa's first democratic government (1995–1997). He is an active member of the Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation and Competence-building Systems (Globelics); the Steering Group of the South Africa Forum for International Solidarity; and the National Executive Committee Subcommittee on Education of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU). He holds a PhD from the Forskningspolitiska Institutet of Lund University in Sweden.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition (contribution to a forum)

    • Adil Najam

      Adil Najam

      Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He has also taught at MIT and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, served as director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, and served as vice chancellor of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He remains a Professor of International Relations and of Earth & Environment. He was a co-author for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), work for which the scientific panel was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the public understanding of climate change science. His books include Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community, Trade and Environment Negotiations: A Resource Book, Envisioning a Sustainable Development Agenda for Trade and Environment, Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia, and Civic Entrepreneurship.

    • Chella Rajan

      Chella Rajan

      Associate Fellow

      Sudhir Chella Rajan is Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Coordinator of the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Tellus Institute, where he worked on energy scenarios and global politics and institutions. He has an extensive research background in transportation, energy systems, and the institutional and political context of environmental policymaking. He is broadly concerned with the interactions among social, political, technological, and environmental factors relating to sustainable development. His research has included energy and environmental scenario analyses, the politics of automobility and pollution control, power sector reform in developing countries, and analysis of institutional reform measures to reduce corruption. Prior to joining the Tellus Institute, he worked at the California Air Resources Board and the International Energy Initiative and as an independent consultant for the United Nations Development Programme. He holds a PhD in environmental science and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

    • Kate Raworth

      Kate Raworth

      Kate Raworth is an economist focused on making economics fit for the twenty-first century. Her book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist is an international bestseller that has been translated into 18 languages, and was long-listed for the 2017 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award. She is co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, working with cities, business, communities, governments and educators to turn Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action. She teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and is Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Raworth was previously a senior researcher at Oxfam (2001–2013), a co-author of the United Nations' Human Development Report (1997–2001) and a fellow of the Overseas Development Institute, working as an economist in the Ministry of Trade, Industries and Marketing, Zanzibar (1994–1997).

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Dollars to Doughnuts (interview)

      Bounding the Planetary Future (contribution to a forum)

    • William Rees

      William Rees

      William Rees is a population ecologist, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus, and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. His research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the implications of global ecological trends for the human prospect, and he has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed and popular articles. He is best known as the originator and co-developer (with his graduate students) of “ecological footprint analysis,” which shows that the world is far into overshoot. He is a founding member and former president of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, a founding Director of the OneEarth Initiative, and a Fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute. He is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada and recipient of a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship and both the international Boulding Prize in Ecological Economics and a Blue Planet Prize (jointly with Dr Mathis Wackernagel). He received a PhD in population ecology from the University of Toronto.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Economics vs. The Economy

      Monetizing Nature (contribution to a forum)

      Consumer Society (contribution to a forum)

      Evolution and Overshoot (contribution to GTI Forum The Population Debate Revisited)

    • Juliet Schor

      Juliet Schor

      Associate Fellow

      Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her PhD is in economics, which she taught at Harvard from 1984 to 1995. Her most recent book is After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win it Back. Schor is also the author of the national best-seller The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy. Her current research topics include the gig economy and the future of work, time use, the “algorithmic workplace,” and the drivers of carbon emissions. Schor is also the co-chair of the Better Future Project, a Massachusetts-based climate activist organization.

      Selected Tellus Publications

      Debating the Sharing Economy

    • Jonathan Cohn

      Jonathan Cohn

      Managing Editor

      Jonathan Cohn is the Managing Editor of the Great Transition Initiative. He is responsible for coordinating the on-going editorial, production, moderation, and dissemination process. Through volunteerism, research, and advocacy, Jonathan has demonstrated a commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice. He has interned with the New Economics Institute and Common Cause, among other organizations, and recently worked in the development team at Civic Works' Baltimore Center for Green Careers. Jonathan Cohn received a BA in English and History (Honors) from Georgetown University in 2010.

      In 2012, he received a MA from Columbia University and an MSc from the London School of Economics through their dual degree program in international and world history.
    • Kathy Nguyen

      Kathy Nguyen

      Operations Manager

      Kathy Nguyen is the Operations Manager of the Tellus Institute with responsibilities for administrative support, book-keeping, and maintaining the online presence of the Institute and its Great Transition Initiative.

      She holds a BS in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.