Political Ecology research projects

Members of the Political Ecology research group are currently engaged in the following research projects.

The list below may also include a small number of archived projects. In due course, these will be listed separately.

Agricultural intensification in pre-colonial Melanesia: The New Guinea project is an attempt to reconstruct the prehistorical geography of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea using archaeological data. Topics include the response of highlands society to tephra fallout from volcanic eruptions, implications of agricultural intensification for gender relations, and links between production, exchange and warfare.
Beyond Win-Win: Interrogating Ecosystem Services Dynamics: This project proposes to bring together knowledge about the extent of spatial and temporal overlap between ecosystem service flows from particular landscapes, as well as the ways in which different stakeholders benefit from these flows over space and time.
Building Capacity to Alleviate Human-Elephant Conflict in North Kenya: This project aims to enhance the conservation and management of Kenya's second largest elephant population (over 5,000 animals) and the ecosystem they inhabit through the implementation of an integrated and sustainable community based approach for alleviating human-elephant conflict (HEC), a serious issue in Africa.
Conservation and Livelihoods: This work reflects growing concerns about the relationship between biodiversity conservation policy and poverty and focuses particularly on poverty/conservation linkages at national and international scales.
Conservation Values: What values do conservationists hold? To what extent do they share common values? In what areas do they disagree with each other? To find out, we have developed, through a series of workshops, a set of 32 statements which cover many of the important issues that conservation practitioners care about. This survey is an attempt to find out what people feel about these statements.
Gaming and Biodiversity Conservation: Computer games have become a vast business (worth $40 billion worldwide in 2010), and gaming is an important part of the lives of significant numbers of people across the world. New trends in the gaming industry include the expansion of "serious games", and the application of ‘gamification’ strategies in the commercial and policy worlds.
Histories of environmental concern: This is an ongoing project that is exploring the development of ideas about nature conservation, environmentalism and sustainability.
Incorporating stakeholder perceptions in participatory forest management in India: Using the analytical framework developed in a previous NRSP project, this project will elucidate the perceptions of diverse stakeholders in the forest sector in Harda district, Madhya Pradesh, India. The project aims to increase learning about differences in stakeholder perceptions over participatory forest management in Harda district, Madhya Pradesh, India; to generate policy relevant findings that can be used to formulate inclusive policy for participatory forest management; and to communicate these findings to key stakeholders and policy actors.
Institutions, agency and incentives in environment and development: Research on institutions, agency and incentives has developed out of original interests in institutional economics and institutional change. A particular focus is on the way in which institutional change is negotiated between different social actors, and the extent to which structural factors influence the evolution of institutions and policy. Research has looked more specifically at the way in which institutions work in practice, especially participatory and decentralised systems of natural resource management. This work has examined collective action in resource management, and the way in which field-level outcomes are a complex product of individual agency and socio-political contexts within which actions are embedded.
Institutions, Collective Action and Cooperation: The role of institutions in shaping and constraining access to natural resources is of increasing interest to development theorists and practitioners alike. Processes of institutional change and adaptation in the post-Soviet context present particular challenges to current thinking on institutions, cooperation and collective action. Current workfocuses on institutional change and adaptation among Mongolian pastoralists following decollectivisation of the herding sector in the early 1990s. Drawing on theories of common pool resource (CPR) management, social capital and collective action it examines institutional path dependency and the ongoing and contested processes of institutional adaptation in recent history.
Institutions, natural resources and ecosystem services: This research area involves a long-standing interest in the sustainability of rural resource use in the developing world. The project established a common framework for the analysis of Common Property Regimes. It addressed issues of exclusion and exploitation, and focus on multiple-use CPRs under competitive consumptive pressures from local, regional, national and international stakeholders. This will allow resource managers to make informed decisions that meet the objective of providing sustained livelihood opportunities for the very poor. The project developed an analytical framework for understanding conflict over common pool resource use.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conservation: Conservation biology is recognized as an interdisciplinary field, but conservation as a practice, and the research analysis of conservation, demands a wider interdisciplinarity. Effective communication between natural and social science is an urgent challenge.
Land Reform, Land Tenure and Poverty: Enhanced understandings of the multiple linkages between land reform, land tenure and land use and between land rights, ownership and poverty are integral to more equitable and sustainable policy in the future. Land reform is an especially pertinent topic in post-socialist transition countries and in the aftermath of decollectivisation, wherein the dissolution of formerly collectivised agricultural sectors has precipitated profound changes in the land-livelihoods nexus. This ongoing research project builds on earlier work undertaken to explore and analyse the (differentiated) effects of group or community land titling on institutions, land use and livelihoods among herders. The implications of tenure reform for poverty alleviation, resource rights and livelihoods are of particular concern and will form the focus of further planned empirical work.
Land Use Change and African-Palaearctic Migrant Birds: The purpose of this project is to review knowledge and improve understanding of the social, economic and policy drivers of land use change in the Sahel that may be associated with population declines in Palaearctic-African migrant birds.
Large Scale Conservation in Britain: This project is studying how large scale conservation projects have been created in the UK. It is investigating in particular 1) the kinds of partnerships or other arrangements that have been used to crate them; 2) the way science has been applied to their design; 3) how they have been influenced by thinking about climate change.
Microcredit in the UK: survey: What constitutes financial inclusion in the UK? What role can microcredit play? Is the group-lending methodology important? How will the financial crisis affect the provision of microcredit? To consider these questions, a set of 32 statements has been developed, which cover many of the important issues surrounding financial inclusion and microcredit in the UK context. This survey is an attempt to find out what people think about these statements and their corresponding discourses.
Negotiating Tradeoffs: Making Informed Choices about Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation: This project will develop a framework to understand how actors actually negotiate over tradeoffs in the context of ecosystem management.
Policy and governance in natural resource management: A major area of interest is policy and governance in the context of natural resource use and management. This stems originally from work on Indian forestry, especially the experience of collaborative stakeholder forestry that has characterized the sector since the mid-1970s. These interests have led to related research on biodiversity conservation and common pool resources, and on water. Research spans issues of resource use and conflict at local levels, as well as the political economy of broader policy processes at national (and global) scales.
Policy Implications of Common Property Resource Knowledge in India, Zimbabwe and Tanzania: A summary of this project will be online shortly.
The conservation and restoration of nature: This research area concerns the power of ideas about non-human nature in environmental policy. Nature is socially constructed both conceptually and physically, and the one influences the other in complex ways. Current research centres on the issue of naturalness in the context of introduced ('alien') species and hybrid habitats.
The political ecology of conservation: This project addresses the politics of land reservation for conservation and the social impacts of conservation policy in sub-Saharan Africa. Work has examined the way narratives of conservation change, and particularly the growing debate about the social impacts of protected areas.