Pranietha Mudliar is a doctoral candidate at the School of Environment and Natural Resources at the Ohio State University.

Her academic and intellectual interests lie in environmental policy, institutional analysis, and adaptive governance. She makes connections between group behaviour and the sustainable management of natural resources.

Broadly, she studies how communities organise themselves to resolve collective action problems for managing natural resources, and the role that institutions and external agencies such as government and non-government agencies play in that process.

For her dissertation, she is studying how communities in rural India and rural United States navigate caste and racial heterogeneity by crafting institutions such as rules, strategies, and norms to improve collective action efforts for augmenting water quantity in India and improving water quality in the United States. She uses theories, concepts, and frameworks from common-pool resource theory through a case study approach for her research