Sango Mahanty is a human geographer who studies the politics of social and environmental change. Her current research examines how communities and civil society cope with dramatic processes of nature-society disruption or "rupture". This work explores how communities are able to gain agency in fragmented settings through their community and civil society networks, and their engagements with government. Sango has explored similar questions of local agency and network formation at sites of intense market development in the Cambodia-Vietnam borderland. She also has a long engagement with research on green economy interventions, especially their labour arrangements and their implications for equity and social conflict. Sango's early research centred on participatory resource management, community development and processes of social learning in Australia, the South Pacific and South Asia. She currently leads the Resources, Environment & Development Program in ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy.