He was born in 1961. Ashish Kothari is an activist and researcher focusing on environment, development, democracy, and alternatives. In the academic field, he has a master's in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. He has been a lecturer at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, guest faculty at several universities, including as a Mellon Fellow at Bowdoin College, USA, and Professor of Practice at National Law School & University, Bengaluru, India. He regularly lectures at universities across the world, online or physically. He has delivered keynote addresses at several conferences in India and other countries, including to the POLLEN (Political Ecology) Network, International Degrowth Conference, International Association for the Study of the Commons, and the Dancing Otherwise Network.

Ashish Kothari is the founder of the Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh, with whose Alternatives team he remains active. He coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, and has served on boards of Greenpeace International and India (chairing the latter for many years), Indian Society of Ecological Economics, World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN Commission on Social, Economic and Environmental Policy, Bombay Natural History Society, and Centre for Pastoralism. He helped establish the IUCN Strategic Direction on Governance, Equity, Communities, and Livelihoods (TILCEPA) and the ICCA Consortium. He is a founding member of Global Sustainability University, a member of Global Working Group Beyond Development, and of the Global Commission for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative. He is a judge on the International Tribunal on Rights of Nature (https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.org) and on its Executive Committee.

Ashish Kothari has been a member of Indian government committees on the National Wildlife Action Plan, the Biological Diversity Act, the Environmental Appraisal of River Valley Projects, and the Implementation of the Forest Rights Act. From the time he was in high school, he has been associated with people’s movements, including the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Beej Bachao Andolan; he is also on the National Working Group of the National Alliance of People’s Movements. He initiated the Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) process and website to network development alternatives in India, a global dialogue process and website on Radical Ecological Democracy, and global processes of bringing various alternatives together, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Adelante. He has also initiated PeDAGoG, the Post-Development Academic-Activist Global Group. He was co-coordinator of the global project ‘Academic-Activist Co-generation of Knowledge on Environmental Justice,’ 2016-19. He is on the advisory board of the project ‘Towards a reinvention of development theory: Theorizing Post-Development’ of Kassel University (Germany), 2020-23; and a collaborating partner in the ‘Alternative Green Futures’ project of Roskilde University (Denmark), 2023-26.

Ashish Kothari has coauthored or coedited over 30 books and booklets, including Protected Area Governance and Management (Australian National University Press), People and Protected Areas in India: Towards Participatory Conservation (Sage Publications), Birds in Our Lives (Orient Blackswan), Sharing Power (Earthscan), Churning the Earth (Penguin India), Alternative Futures: India Unshackled (Authors UpFront), and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika). He has written two books for children, Wildlife in a City Pond and Shero to the Rescue. He has authored or co-authored over 800 articles, including in journals like Development, Futures, Economic and Political Weekly, Oryx, Scientific American, Human Geography, Geoforum, and Sustainability Science; in newspapers/magazines like The Guardian, The Hindu, Indian Express, Times of India, Hindustan Times, Frontline, and Meer, Outlook, Outlook Traveller, Scroll, and The Wire; and in edited books such as the Research Handbook on Law, Environment, and the Global South. He has been on the Editorial Advisory Board of Oryx and other journals or magazines.

Ashish Kothari is a keen photographer and doodler.

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