Kulbhushan Balooni is Associate Professor in the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode in India. He teaches environmental management. He also has teaching experience in managerial economics and common property resource management. He undertakes interdisciplinary research on natural resource management with focus on socio-economics, governance (policy and institutions), and property rights in South and Southeast Asia.
His recent research interests include examining the role of the state and local elites in decentralized forest governance, effects of popular participation on forest conservation in the developing countries, changing forest tenure regime influenced by market-driven forest policies and local livelihood concerns in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and sustainability issues in collective and traditional water harvesting systems. Kulbhushan has published papers in international peer reviewed journals like Agricultural Water Management, Conservation & Society, Ecology & Society (forthcoming), Geoforum, Journal of Forestry, Natural Resources Forum, Society & Natural Resources, Unasylva and World Development and Indian journals like Agricultural Economics Research Review, Economic & Political Weekly and IIMB Management Review. Kulbhushan also has research and consultancy interests in the area of tourism-, health- and fisheries-management. In the past, he has undertaken consultancy projects for organizations like Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Kanagawa, Japan; Ministry of Forests & Environment, Government of India; Government of Madhya Pradesh; and Union Territory of Lakshadweep.
Kulbhushan is a Graduate in Forestry and Post-Graduate in economics from the University of Horticulture & Forestry, Solan. He was a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Doctoral Fellow at the RBI Endowment Unit, Institute of Rural Management Anand and was awarded PhD in Economics by Sardar Patel University in 1998. He undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Tokyo during 2003-2005.
He has had past work affiliations with the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal and Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo (2008), University of Copenhagen (2007), and University of Ruhuna (2006).