Jyoti Yadav is a Senior Program Associate with the Food, Land, and Water program at WRI India. She supports the team with their ongoing work on restoring landscapes in central India for people, nature, and communities, with a special focus on analyzing policy incentives and barriers for implementing landscape restoration. She is closely working on strengthening policy engagement with the State governments of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Chhattisgarh for strategizing nature-based solutions to implement and scale up integrated landscape approach.

Jyoti comes from an interdisciplinary background with an expertise in – policy research & analysis, capacity building, and project implementation. Her work with diverse set of stakeholders –grassroots institutions, government functionaries, civil society organizations, academic partners, and implementation agencies, has equipped her with a multidimensional approach to designing evidence-based policies and solutions. Prior to joining WRI India, she has worked at the Haryana Institute of Public Administration, where she was involved in conducting training needs assessment, designing capacity building workshops for government functionaries, research & documentation on matters related to food security, labor laws, governance, and public policy. Jyoti has worked at SEWA Cooperative Federation on gender and livelihoods, enterprise ecosystem development through market linkages and capacity building. During her experience with the Chief Minister’s Good Governance Associate Programme with Government of Haryana, she closely worked with the district administration and independently led projects on implementation of government flagship programs in the field of education, digital governance, women’s entrepreneurship, health, and rural development.

Jyoti holds a master’s degree in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai where she cultivated her interests in democratic participatory policy making, bridging the gap between practice and theory through empirical research and systems thinking. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Honors from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University.

Jyoti likes to read, journal, travel and enjoys gardening in her leisure time.