The Brown School’s international research crosses both disciplines and continents. International Programs Director Gautam Yadama, PhD, works on the frontlines studying how poor communities govern common pool resources and public goods for their livelihoods. He is also committed to creating substantive international experiences for students.
You’ve been developing new international training opportunities for Brown School graduate students. Why is that so important?
We need to create the kind of structures that enable students to grasp the complexities of social work, public health, and social policy issues in low- and middle-income countries. We’re focused on creating an international experience that has depth. One way is to engage graduate students in faculty field research. We’ve also developed winter and summer institutes for students in partnership with our collaborating organizations, such as Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Peking University in China, or the Tata Institute of Social Sciences [TISS] and the Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay, India.
You have had some success working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other universities and institutions to tap into their local expertise and resources. What are some of your current ventures?
We just completed an Institute on Mental Health, Gender, and Poverty where students went to Katmandu, Nepal, and Chennai and Mumbai, India. We completed a second institute is on Energy, Environment, and Development in Udaipur, India. My colleagues Shanta Pandey and Patricia Kohl led this effort. We organized this institute with two McDonnell Academy partner universities—IIT-Bombay and TISS and the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). Students produced case studies along specific themes concerning energy, environment, and development. We also have students in India working with Pratim Biswas [chair, Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering] and me on a study of emissions in poor households with FES. Five of our students are working on project in India with Peter Hovmand, director of our new Social System Design Lab, and Tiffany Knight [assistant professor of Biology and assistant director of Environmental Studies], and myself. This project models the link between livelihood strategies of the poor and local forest ecosystems.
These seem unusual teams for social work field research—engineers, biologists, systems dynamics experts, and economic development social workers. How do all the parts fit together?
Pratim Biswas, as an engineer, is concerned about emissions from combustion when poor people in Andhra Pradesh burn firewood for fuel. I’m concerned about how to reduce that dependence and ensure energy security in these households. But we both are concerned about health and climate effects from black carbon due to incomplete combustion of biomass. Over time, health effects from prolonged exposure to emissions from biomass combustion reinforce poverty. And poverty reinforces, again, further dependence on these natural resources. Across biology and engineering, we’re all looking at a larger set of issues: What are the inter-linkages between the human systems and the natural systems? What is the dynamic between these two systems, and how are they connected?
This seems extraordinarily complex.
Our new Social System Design Lab helps us understand how it all fits together. Peter Hovmand and I developed a method called Community-Driven System Dynamics to examine these complex processes that are unfolding on the ground. We can’t be talking just to “experts”—we have to talk to the real experts, the people who are entrenched in these problems. While it might seem complicated and involved, this method has been very useful and has provided greater clarity in understanding complex and risk-prone poor households. People provide us with the information, and we build the models showing various possible outcomes. And then we take it back to them in the local language to validate the structures that produce complex behaviors.
That seems a hallmark of the Brown School’s international programs—their interdisciplinary nature. Why is that so important?
It is essential. Solutions to these complex social challenges lie at intersections of different disciplines. By compartmentalizing a problem on disciplinary grounds, we might find some comfort, but it certainly distorts all that we need to know to eventually affect that condition.
Read the full interview with Associate Professor Yadama in the next issue of Social Impact, our annual magazine.
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Written by Rick Skwiot