Manogna Goparaju

Research Database

Manogna is an Environmental Economics and Environmental Management PhD student with the Stockholm Environment Institute York (SEI Y) at the Department of Environment and Geography, University of York who is supervised by Dr. Corrado Topi and Prof. Piran White.

Her research interests lie in financing sustainability and development, specifically with respect to the private sector. She is, additionally, interested in mapping sustainability & environmental policies and laws onto private sector agendas, priorities, and operations. Her current research focuses on using the India Companies Act 2013 to encourage the Indian private financial sector to directly/indirectly contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals via their corporate social responsibility policies and operations. She primarily works with multinational, conglomerate private banks and non-banking financial companies (mutual funds, insurance, stockbroking, venture capital firms, etc.) in order to map, using systems thinking, company agendas and policies with those of the Indian Companies Act 2013 and the Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, she maps decision-making processes within the aforementioned type of organisations and the drivers and barriers for financing sustainability and development.

Manogna holds a BSc. in Environmental Science and a MSc. in Corporate Social Responsibility with Environmental Management, both from the University of York. She conducted her MSc. dissertation in collaboration with SEI-Y’s GreenEcoNet project, focusing on the drivers and enablers associated with adopting and implementing corporate social responsibility in Indian private multi-sector companies. The research, further, investigated the initial effects of the Indian Companies Act 2013 on the Indian private sector.

Manogna has previously worked in the corporate social responsibility team in the Greenko Group, a renewable energy company and as a researcher in Amber Flux, an artificial intelligence (AI) related tech start-up creating technologies and patents for sustainable energy. Currently her work as a research trainee for IGDC’s Finance for Development (FFD) Network, investigating the causes for systemic failures in finance for development in mid- and low- income countries.