Sunita Narain has been with the Centre for Science and Environment for the past 22 years. She is currently the director of the Centre and the director of the Society for Environmental Communications and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth. In her years at the Centre she has worked both to analyse and study the relationship between environment, development and to create public consciousness about the need for sustainable development. She has also worked to develop the management and financial support systems needed for the institution which has over 100 staff members and a dynamic programme profile. Currently she is overall incharge of the Centre's management and also coordinates and plays an active role in a number of research projects and public campaigns. Her research interests range from global democracy, with a special focus on climate change to the need for local democracy where she has worked both on forest related resource management and water issues. She began her career by writing and researching for the State of India's Environment reports and then went on to study issues related to forest management. For this project she travelled across the country to understand people's management of natural resources and in 1989 co-authored the publication, Towards Green Villages that advocates local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development. In the early 1990s she got involved with global environmental issues and continues to work on these both as a researcher and advocate. In 1991 she co-authored the publication, Global Warming in an Unequal World: a case of environmental colonialism and in 1992, Towards a Green World: Should environmental management be built on legal conventions or human rights? Since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, she has worked on a number of articles and papers on issues related to flexibility mechanisms and the need for equity and entitlements in climate negotiations. In 2000, she co-edited the publication, Green Politics: Global Environmental Negotiations, which looks at the emerging ecological globalisation framework and puts forward an agenda for the South on global negotiations. In 1997, pushing the concern for water harvesting she co-edited the book, Dying Wisdom: Rise, fall and potential of India's water harvesting systems. Since then, she has worked on a number of articles on the policy interventions needed for ecoregeneration of India's rural environment and poverty reduction. In 1999, she co-edited the State of India's Environment, The Citizens' Fifth Report and in 2001, Making Water Everybody's Business: the practice and policy of water harvesting. Narain remains an active participant in the nationally and internationally civil society. She serves on the boards of different organisations and on governmental committees and has spoken at many forums across the world on issues of her concern and expertise.
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