Sharad Lele: “Inter- and transdisciplinary research should become the ordinary way to work for sustainability and justice”
In India, the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment has been developing inter- and trans-disciplinary research for 25 years to drive positive environmental and social outcomes Sharad Lele is Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Policy and Governance at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), in Bangalore, India What is your current activity? Sharad Lele: ATREE has two major research centres: the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, and the Centre for Environment and Development, of which I led the latter for about 10 years. I now play a more advisory role while continuing my own research. Over the past five years, my work has focused heavily on the forest sector—in which I started my PhD and postdoctoral work—while also contributing to water policy and governance. What are the main challenges today in the forest sector in India? S. L.: India still struggles with colonial legacies in forest governance. Forests were historically treated as state property for revenue and industrial use, with local communities sidelined. In 2006, the landmark Forest Rights Act aimed to reverse this, granting communities legal rights over their traditional forests. My work now focuses on enabling the Act’s implementation—particularly in central India—through research, action, training grassroots organizations, and engaging policymakers to democratize forest governance. Could you give an example of field action? S. L.: In Bastar district, in the state of Chhattisgarh, where 60% of the population is Indigenous, we help communities claim legal rights over their forests under the Forest Rights Act and develop sustainable management plans. Our field team, composed entirely of Indigenous members, has been working for four years to ensure these communities can use their forests for livelihoods, conservation, and cultural needs. So forestry work at ATREE isn’t just about trees and ecology? S. L.: Exactly. We follow a socio-ecological systems approach. In practice, that means helping communities understand their legal rights, claim forest land, and design management plans. We blend traditional ecological knowledge with modern science, documenting Indigenous practices and integrating them with scientific insights. How do you define a sustainable future in this context? S. L.: Historically, forestry in India meant alienating communities to enable timber extraction or, later, to enable wildlife conservation. Post-independence, this state-controlled model persisted. The Forest Rights Act shifts the paradigm: communities now hold rights, and forest management starts with them. They can balance livelihood needs, cultural values, and conservation while rejecting practices like monoculture plantations of teak or eucalyptus, which degrade ecosystems and exclude local users. This new approach emphasizes diverse, multifunctional forests managed from the bottom up—potentially even integrating wildlife tourism managed by communities themselves. So the 2006 Act is your legal foundation? S. L.: Yes, but implementation remains a challenge. Forest departments often resist ceding control, limiting communities’ ability to exercise their rights. Our role is to support these communities, and demonstrate that their methods are not only legitimate but often ecologically superior to bureaucratic management. More broadly, what is ATREE’s purpose? S. L.: ATREE is dedicated to biodiversity conservation and environmentally sustainable livelihoods. We focus on both sustainability and justice. For example, in forestry, you can sustainably harvest timber for a century but deny Indigenous communities their rights: that’s unjust. In water governance, we address both sustainability and equity. Distributive equity is central to water, both within sectors, such as domestic water availability, as well as across competing sectors, such as agriculture, urban use, industry, and power generation. Moreover, excessive or unsustainable groundwater extraction impacts downstream users as well, showing how sustainability and justice are deeply intertwined. Why was it necessary to create ATREE outside of universities? S. L.: Twenty-five years ago, and even today, few Indian institutions supported truly interdisciplinary research that met rigorous academic standards while engaging with real-world problems. Academia often remains siloed in different disciplines and distant from practitioners. ATREE was created to bridge that gap. Our motto, “knowledge for change,” reflects this mission: we generate research not for its own sake but to drive positive environmental and social outcomes. Do you try to influence academia more broadly? S. L.: We try to influence by example. ATREE runs one of India’s most interdisciplinary PhD programmes in environmental studies, where multidisciplinary teaching is core. We share our experiences in journals and conferences, contributing to global discussions on interdisciplinarity. But academia has inertia—especially in India, where centrally funded universities dominate, and independent institutes like ATREE are lower in the hierarchy. Change requires collaboration. That is why I co-founded the Indian chapter of the International Society for Ecological Economics, working with other academics to promote integrative approaches. How could The Earth-Humanity Coalition (EHC) help? S. L.: In many ways, it’s the reverse: EHC can amplify lessons from ATREE’s trial-and-error journey as a purpose-built transdisciplinary institute. Developing countries especially need such models because resources for institutional experimentation are limited. EHC could convene like-minded institutions worldwide, those with 20–25 years of experience in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, to share successes and failures. Together, we could brainstorm how to restructure academia or, alternatively, scale up experiments like ATREE: imagine “a thousand ATREEs” globally, operating on academia’s boundaries but deeply connected to real-world challenges. What concrete steps could EHC take? S. L.: First, bring together institutions like ours for knowledge exchange and collective problem-solving, identifying internal challenges and external barriers to inter- and trans-disciplinarity. Second, engage academic leadership, university presidents and policymakers, with both arguments for reform and concrete examples of how transdisciplinary structures can work. If we could influence even 10 major universities, that would be significant impact. How would this differ from gatherings like the Sustainability Research and Innovation Congress? S. L.: SRI focuses on exchanging research on specific themes, like water, mining, energy, and less on rethinking the knowledge-making system itself. What EHC can propose is deeper: interrogating how academia functions and how to reshape it to address sustainability challenges. Over time, even transformative initiatives like ecological economics have become professionalized, publishing journals, holding conferences, without changing the mainstream. We need to reignite their original vision: