Political Science Faculty and Staff
Parakh Hoon
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Florida, 2005
Ph.D., University of Florida, 2005
His scholarly work and research interests center on the political economy of development and environment, governance and local democracy, and how emerging international environmental and development norms articulate with local livelihoods and practices. He teaches in the area of African Politics, Political Economy, International Development, and Global Environmental Politics.
For the last decade Professor Hoon has conducted field research in Botswana, Zambia, and India and has been working on southern African politics and its environment, including the politics of wildlife conservation and agricultural development, and its effects on rural communities. He has been a visiting assistant professor at the School of International Service, American University in Washington DC, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has also worked as a research analyst with local NGOs in India and at the United Nations Development Program in New York. He has been a non-resident fellow with the Institutions and Governance Program at World Resources Institute in Washington, DC where he was involved in two comparative research projects on local democracy and natural resource management, and commodity chain analysis as a policy tool.
Professor Hoon has published on the politics of community conservation, the relationship between governance and sustainable livelihoods, and local institutional innovation. His publications include, "Impersonal Markets and Personal Communities? Wildlife, Conservation, and Development in Botswana," Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy, 7:143-160, 2004; "Governance and Sustainable Livelihoods: Pinning down two troublesome concepts," with Goran Hyden, in Hans Bressers and Walter Rosenbaum, eds., Achieving Sustainable Development: The Challenge of Governance across Social Scales (Praeger, 2004); and most recently "Working is Celebrating: The Syncretic Politics of Labor Transformation in Rural Zambia," in Dennis Galvan and Rudra Sil, eds., Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007). Professor Hoon is currently working on a comparative project in southern Africa on bottom-up decentralized community-based and recent trans-boundary/transfrontier conservation approaches.
Email: Parakh Hoon