Rather than treating climate change, technology, or development as isolated issues, Butt’s work examines how history, governance, and unequal power relationships shape environmental outcomes across the Global South.
Butt, a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, and senior advisor to the Center for Global Health Equity, studies political ecology and environmental justice. His research examines how environmental change, development and governance intersect across the Global South, with recent work exploring environmental health, data justice, climate coloniality and the politics of infrastructure.
“We tend to focus on the technology itself,” said Butt, professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability. “But if you only focus on the technology, you don’t see everything that had to come together in order for it to operate the way that it does.”
That broader perspective is central to Butt’s work in political ecology, an interdisciplinary field that examines how environmental change is shaped by history, governance, economics, and power. Rather than viewing environmental problems as isolated technical challenges, political ecology asks who benefits from development, who bears its costs, and whose voices are included, or excluded, from decision-making.
Those questions are especially relevant in South Asia, where digital technologies are rapidly becoming part of everyday life. Agricultural platforms promise to help farmers increase yields. Financial technology offers new ways to access credit and insurance. Artificial intelligence is increasingly promoted as a tool for managing natural resources and improving productivity.
Yet Butt says those technologies cannot be understood apart from the social and political systems in which they operate.
“If there’s going to be a lot of technology infrastructure in the Global South, then an obvious question becomes: How do we power it? Where does the electricity come from? What infrastructure is needed to generate and transmit it?” he said.
His research also examines what he describes as the growing “datafication” of development. In agricultural regions such as Punjab and Haryana, farmers increasingly generate data through digital platforms that offer recommendations about irrigation, fertilizer use and crop management. While those tools can create opportunities, they also raise questions about who owns the data, who profits from it, and how it shapes decisions affecting local communities.
For Butt, those questions cannot be answered by treating South Asia as a single, uniform region.
International discussions often speak about “India” as though environmental policy, technological development and climate impacts are the same everywhere, he said. In reality, agricultural practices, state policies, and local governance differ significantly across regions.
“Agricultural policy in Haryana is different from Maharashtra, which is different from Punjab, which is different from southern India,” Butt said. “There are many different things happening at once.”
Recognizing that complexity is essential for understanding environmental justice. National narratives may identify broad trends, but they often overlook the local histories and political conditions that shape how communities experience environmental change.
That same perspective challenges common assumptions about pollution and waste.
Public discussions about electronic waste often emphasize pollution flowing from wealthier countries to poorer ones. While those unequal relationships are real, Butt says the picture is far more complicated than a simple story of victims and perpetrators. Environmental justice research, he argues, shows that recycling communities have their own governance systems, divisions of labor, and social hierarchies that deserve equal attention. Recycling and waste-processing communities are not simply chaotic dumping grounds - gender, class, and local social hierarchies all shape how environmental risks are experienced.
“When we reduce that complexity down to these simplicities, it doesn’t actually allow us to see the nature of the problem,” Butt said.
That emphasis on complexity has become a defining feature of Butt’s research and teaching. He encourages students to question assumptions that often accompany discussions of development and environmental degradation.
Instead of asking why people live near polluted landscapes, he asks students to trace how those landscapes came to exist. Where does waste originate? What policies made those systems possible? Who benefits from them, and who pays the environmental cost?
Answering those questions, Butt says, requires what he calls a process of “unlearning” – moving beyond familiar narratives that divide the world into wealthy countries creating environmental harm and poorer countries simply experiencing it.
“I find it beneficial to actually link Global North and Global South,” he said. “If we just take things at face value, then we end up with the same set of stories over and over again.”
For Butt, environmental justice is ultimately about giving communities the space to define their own experiences.
“We need a new way of thinking,” he said. “Part of what we’re trying to do with political ecology and environmental justice is to break up some of these ways of thinking so that it gives more agency and autonomy to people in the Global South, to be able to tell their stories on their own terms.”
As countries across South Asia continue to balance economic development, technological innovation and environmental change, Butt believes researchers have a responsibility to move beyond simple narratives. Understanding the region’s environmental future, he says, begins not with easy answers, but with better questions and a willingness to examine the histories and power structures that shape them.
