Ribot was a Senior Associate in the Institutions and Governance program at the World Resources Institute from 1999 to 08. He has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, a fellow at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and has worked for numerous development agencies. He conducts research on decentralization and democratic local government; natural resource tenure and access; distribution along natural resource commodity chains; and vulnerability in the face of climate and environmental change.