Professor Krishna Shrestha

Krishna is Professor of Global Development at the UNSW ADA School of Social Sciences. He is a development and environmental geographer with research interests encompassing: Global Indigenous Studies; Critical Development Studies; Environmental Governance; Disaster Resilience, and Climate Change Adaptation, in particular the intersection of the five with his work on Environmental Justice. 

Krishna is an Indigenous scholar with global recognition and local grounding.  He has an enduring passion and commitment to the ethical and accountable research, education, and leadership. His scholarship works alongside a commitment to activism and public engagement and addresses urgent questions pertaining to indigenous rights, climate justice, public policy, the right to land and the everyday and systemic struggles that continue to dominate the lives of the most marginalised communities in the world.  He focuses on scholarship, engagement, and leadership to effect real impacts in practice and policy, and these activities are driven by the belief that cultural and contextual underpinnings are fundamental to re-conceptualise research design and methods and to produce alternative data and evidence to contest hegemonic knowledge. Most of his work is interdisciplinary and empirically based in South Asia and integrates indigenous, social, and natural science methodologies to examine the relationship between social, cultural, political, and ecological systems. 

Krishna's work constitutes blending moral philosophy and theories of justice with critical development studies, political ecology and communicative action. His research on these five themes simultaneously engages with grand theory and real-world societal challenges.  He uses grounded analysis of socio-political and ecological dynamics through a multi-scale perspective where the role of unequal power relations in constituting a politicised environment is a central theme.  His research gives particular attention to the ways in which problems of justice are linked to systems of social hierarchy and political and economic control.  He uses a ‘critical pragmatic’ approach to development and environmental problems in which rigorous explanation is balanced with carefully considered policy alternatives. Most of his work is interdisciplinary and empirically based which integrates indigenous, social and natural science methodologies to examine the interrelationship between social and natural systems. His research, teaching and engagements are driven by the belief that cultural and contextual understandings arte vital for education and science to shift paradigms, enabling alternative ways to understand and address complex social and environmental challenges.

Currently Professor of Global Development at the School of Social Sciences, ADA, UNSW Sydney, Krishna was Program Director at the Urban and Regional Planning and Policy at the University of Sydney.  He also held various positions at the University of Queensland, Macquarie University and the Department of Forests in Nepal Government. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Geography, Cambridge University, UK, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (NUS). He served as a member of the Academic Board at the University of Sydney. He is the recipient of the Endeavour Research Fellowship by the Australian Government. He has an interdisciplinary qualification, with higher degrees in Geography (PhD Sydney), Higher Education (Grad. Cert. Sydney), Environmental Policy and Management (MEEM, UTS) and Forestry (BSc TU Nepal).