Jagdeesh Rao

Bio

"Jagdeesh Rao had little knowledge or experience of rural life until his university studies took him to a village barely 100 kilometers from Hyderabad, where he was shocked by the evidence of inequality and the stark poverty that persisted in India, even 40 years after independence. He felt an affinity for those who suffered from discrimination, and worked throughout the 1980s and 1990s with rural communities struggling with issues of poverty and environmental degradation.Jagdeesh Rao joined the Foundation for Ecological Security as its first employee in 2001. At the beginning of his career, he was among those advancing new ideas about “the commons” or common-pool resources—that the tragedy of overexploitation is not inevitable, that regulation and privatization are not necessarily the solution, and that those who live closest to and use common resources, and know most about the situation, can engage in negotiating and enforcing cooperative strategies for use and stewardship. Today those ideas have taken hold and Jagdeesh Rao is recognized as a world leader in the discipline." (https://skoll.org/organization/foundation-for-ecological-security/)