Welcome to my website! My name is Chandra Shekhar, and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. Before coming to OU in August 2024, I completed my PhD in Public Policy and Environmental Philosophy at MIT in 2022, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My work has been supported by the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows, the MIT Science Impact Initiative, and the MIT Presidential Fellowship.

When I’m not doing research, I love staying active and spending time outdoors. I also enjoy reading novels, playing the trombone, and jet-skiing.

Research

My research examines the political economy of development and institutional change, social policy, environmental philosophy, and social theory. I study the persistence of sub-optimal institutions, such as corruption in government organizations or institutional capture by bureaucratic and political elites. Furthermore, I investigate how climate change-induced environmental degradation impacts socially vulnerable populations in North America, Africa, and Asia, reinforcing social contracts that benefit dominant social groups while systematically marginalizing minority groups. Additionally, in my work on the philosophy of knowledge and the philosophy of power, I examine discrimination and the recognition claims of socially vulnerable groups, employing a methodological approach grounded in epistemological and ontological pluralism.

Publications in Progress

▪ The Logic of Corruption in Government Bureaucracies. (Book project based on my dissertation). Under contract with Cambridge University Press. (Scheduled for publication in August 2025).

Using extensive fieldwork in three of India’s major state bureaucracies and building on innovative strategies to measure corruption, this book sheds light on the long-standing puzzle of why corruption exists and persists in government bureaucracies. I argue that corruption in governments could be exclusively and exhaustively conceptualized as grand and petty corruption and that the former causes the latter. I show that these two kinds of corruption are organized around bureaucratic transfers and that corrupt exchanges at various levels are thickly embedded in their ongoing social and political relations. The stability of the linkages between grand and petty corruption explain why corruption persists.

Manuscript in Preparation

▪ Identifying the demands of justice in Indigenous groups facing environmental risks: The case of a climate change-induced forced migration of a Native American community in Louisiana. (With Janelle Knox-Hayes)

Abstract

What are the demands of justice when Indigenous communities suffer serious environmental harms? We analyze environmental injustices in the climate change-induced forced migration of a Native American community of southeastern Louisiana in the United States. The article uses archival analysis, the lived experiences of the community members (including its Chief), and in-depth interviews of government stakeholders involved in the planning process led by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to safely relocate the Native members. The paper contends that rather than merely focusing on the fair distribution of environmental risks and benefits, the pursuit of justice should also be process-sensitive; meaningfully involve the risk-facing community; and respect its values, cultures, histories, traditions, knowledge systems, and sovereignty concerns. We argue that as the world confronts the reality of anthropogenic climate change, we must move beyond distributional equity to focus more on recognition claims of Indigenous peoples in order to design more equitable resilience policies.

▪ Why Persistent Corruption? Evidence from a State Police Bureaucracy in India

Abstract

I examine the nature of linkages between grand corruption of senior officials and petty corruption of street officials in an Indian state police bureaucracy. Using a randomized response survey of 154 serving police officials, in-depth semi-structured interviews of an additional 58 police officials, and an ethnography of street vendors at an informal marketplace, I find evidence that these linkages are mutually reinforcing and that they are organized around the market for corruption in bureaucratic transfers. The mutually reinforcing nature of these linkages helps us understand long-standing questions about the existence and persistence of corruption in government bureaucracies and why anti-corruption reforms are difficult to implement.

▪ A Social Choice-based Approach to Global Justice

Abstract

There are two major challenges in conceptualizing global justice. First, most theories of justice are based on some form of a social contract, which limits their applicability outside the sovereign boundaries of a state. These social contract-based theories need a Leviathan to enforce required rules, and we do not have a world government to play such a role. A difficulty that has engaged some authors is the contrast between the standard treatments of social choice for a sovereign nation (Arrow’s pioneering work does not depart from that basic model) and the essential demand for a multi-nation perspective for a reasonable treatment of global justice. Second, understanding the demands of liberty in the global context poses dilemmas. This paper introduces a possible new approach to global justice.

▪ A Phenomenological Examination of Discrimination Against Women. (With Sally Haslanger)

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the conception of “power,” especially its connection with women’s conformity to socially constructed disadvantageous oppressive practices. We critically evaluate the liberal, Marxist, and Foucauldian accounts of power and supplement them with a phenomenological investigation of the lived experience of ten women in New Delhi. Power can be exercised by an oppressor in three ways. One is the sovereign use of power as a brute force to unleash violence aimed at crushing the body; human civilization is replete with examples. The second is power as a controlling force to dominate women through social and political institutions in liberalism and class domination in Marxism. The third is a more subtle and nuanced Foucauldian exercise of power as an invisible, diffuse, and naturalizing force to achieve voluntary submission aimed not at crushing women’s bodies but colonizing their souls and “disciplining” them to normalize discrimination. What is distinctive about the Foucauldian conceptualization of power, compared with the traditional liberal and Marxist accounts underpinned by a juridico-discursive notion of power? Using women’s lived experiences about how power disciplines them to conform to sex-based discrimination, our aim is to tease out that notion of power that is distinctively Foucauldian and cannot be captured by historical accounts.

▪ The Case for Vector Utility

Abstract

I discuss the history and plausibility of taking a vector view of utility. I build on the remarks on utility presented by Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, and even Francis Hutcheson, along with the more familiar arguments presented by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. One thesis, among others, that seems to strongly emerge from these investigations is the “ordinariness” of thinking of utility in vector terms, with distinct components. People who had interesting observations to make about utility typically began with the variety of forms in which pleasure and pain come. However, many of them followed that by talking about the advantages of a singular view (or a scalar view, as I call it) of utility for some purposes. Even Bentham could not escape a vector-beginning when he started with “the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” Ultimately, the issue that looms large is not the plausibility of a vector view, which is straightforward. But what is important is the case for—and against—aggregation into an alleged single magnitude for many purposes of analysis and judgment (including the assessment of “the well-being of people”). I argue that despite the usefulness of an aggregated representation, if the scalar view were to eclipse the foundational vector characteristics, something of real importance would be lost. The loss would be not just from a descriptive point of view but also for further analytical and practical use. It becomes apparent that some issues of justice cannot be handled by aggregating the interests of all. I also discuss the possibility of “multiple moralities,” which could be important in decision theory. This thinking is in part an outgrowth of conversation with Amartya Sen and has benefitted from his guidance as well as that of Avner de-Shalit.

Book Project (in Progress)

Climate change is profoundly yet unequally impacting human conditions. Indigenous groups who share a deeply personal and spiritual connection with their natural environment underpinned by eco-centric values and a non-materialistic worldview are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-induced environmental degradation. There are many distinct Indigenous peoples, numbering nearly 500 million, spread across 90 countries, stewarding or holding tenure rights over more than a quarter of Earth’s terrestrial surface, representing more than 37% of natural lands. Furthermore, Indigenous lands contain over one-third of the world’s intact forests and provide habitat for about 60% of terrestrial mammal species.

Environmental justice has become a rallying cry against environmental inequities. Activists use it to highlight environmental grievances in socially vulnerable groups; scholars, to understand the diverse impacts of environmental degradation; and policymakers, to design remedial measures. However, the concept, especially in its current academic and policy usage, is used in a quest to find some morally just distribution of environmental burdens and benefits. It ignores how environmental maldistributions affect people’s real possibilities and how existing social mechanism and practices oppress and dominate Indigenous lives.

Using empirical evidence from my ongoing collaborations with Indigenous communities in the US, Kenya, and India, the book project (1) provides a qualitatively thick description of the pluralistic environmental harms to the Indigenous peoples, (2) critiques distributional theories of environmental justice for failing to fully comprehend the harms, and (3) develops an alternative theorization of Indigenous environmental justice that better captures and characterizes these environmental harms. The alternative theorization conceives injustice as an expression of institutionalized domination and oppression that disregard Indigenous recognition claims, significantly broadening the distributive focus of contemporary political theories of social justice.