Research projects - Society, Environment and Development cluster

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

Circumpolar History and Public Policy

Circumpolar Governance: Many significant developments in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions stem from issues of governance. Current attempts to forge self-governing political regions and environmental management regimes raise profound questions about the relationship between community and territory. Traditionally, the competing ambitions and interests of nation-states have defined the structure and boundaries of the polar regions. These histories have tended to divide and stratify the regions.
Field practices and environmental science in the Canadian Arctic, 1950-2000: This research is concerned with the changing epistemic role of fieldwork and field practices in physically based Arctic environmental science, over the second half of the twentieth century. The area of interest is in the history of scientific research on northern Canada over the last half-century, and in understanding how this relates to the epistemology and ontology of Arctic field science. This project emerges out of a geographical sensitivity, but gathers an increasingly interdisciplinary momentum.
Gender and Nationalism in Indigenous Political Movements: A Comparative Study of Nunavut, Canada and Tuva, Russian Federation: The objective of this research is to examine the influence of nationalist ideology on the construction of political identities and on understandings of gender in the indigenous postcolonial world.
Institutions and Public Policy in the Field Sciences: This is an international comparative study of the history of field stations across five Arctic nations (USA, Canada, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden) with the aim of understanding how field practices drive the major agendas of environmental research. In the project we intend to use the International Polar Year 2007-2008 as an opportunity to identify and analyse the work (e.g. planning, calibrating, publishing, sharing data) required to make field observations meaningful across a range of scales and contexts of users or audiences. This also represents a singular opportunity to understand how the field sciences have generated a scientific and cultural legacy. We will analyse former and present research station sites to understand how the residues of scientific practice become valid knowledge, collective memory and heritage.
Maritime Geographies of Science: Whereas the importance of the world oceans for global security - particularly their circulation, oil and gas reserves, fishing stocks and indigenous culture - is now widely recognised, they are all threatened or endangered. However our knowledge of their environmental history, how they came to be the way they are, is surprisingly limited and at best fragmented. This research aims to develop the historical foundations for a new interdisciplinary understanding of the science of the oceans that can explain the nature and direction of change, and take account of the much greater and more diverse communities of historical actors or stakeholders than has been widely acknowledged.
Traplines and Tar Sands: An Ethnographic Analysis of Intersecting Economies in a Subarctic Indigenous Community: Indigenous communities within Canada's arctic and sub-arctic regions are increasingly involved in what can be described as 'mixed' economic adaptations. These systems include traditional patterns of resource harvesting, but also incorporate inputs such as cash derived from wages, funds received as social transfers, and income obtained from the sale of locally produced goods derived from harvested resources. The aim of this research is to undertake an ethnographic analysis of the relationships between those elements of economic activity that comprise a 'mixed' pattern of economy in Fort Chipewyan Canada, a Cree and Chipewyan community located in N.E. Alberta.

Polar Social Science and Humanities Group

Developing Indigenous research methodologies in the arctic (IRM-A): examining the impacts of settlement on socialization and youth experience in Siberia and Alaska: This international, collaborative, comparative ethnographic inquiry aims to explore the ways indigenous research methodologies can be effectively utilized in the study of youth with special focus on local impacts of settlement on socialization practices and experiences of growing up in two arctic Indigenous communities: one in Siberia and one in Alaska.
Healing interactions between shamans and clients (Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva): This study focuses principally on private consultations between shamans and their clients. It is primarily concerned with occurrences of misfortune and illness resulting from affliction with "black" sorcery and curses. Based on a number of case studies as characteristic examples of illness and misfortune invoked by curses and ill-intentioned sorcery, this research attempts to grasp and analyse the psycho-cultural underpinning of the explanation of these occurrences.
Negotiating pathways to adulthood: social change and indigenous culture in four Arctic communities: This project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, examines shared and divergent stressors and resilience strategies among young people from communities among the Alaskan Inupiat, Alaskan Yup’ik, Canadian Inuit, Norwegian Sami and Siberian Eveny.
The nativeness of settlers: constructions of belonging in Soviet and contemporary Chukotka: This research focuses on the effects of rapid socio-economic change and in-out migration on settler identity in one of the most remote parts of the Russian Federation. The story of Soviet-era settlement in Chukotka and the development of a sense of northern belonging in the settler community are major concerns in the research, as is the transformation of social networks, power bases and community identity now occurring in Chukotka under the administration of governor Roman Abramovich (since early 2001).

Society & Environment

Addressing Biodiversity Loss: Lessons from Climate Change: Biodiversity loss is a problem of global significance with serious implications for human wellbeing, compromising our ability to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Despite this, and despite the wealth of scientific evidence on the scale of the problem, biodiversity loss does not receive commensurate attention at national and international levels. To address this issue, we have conducted a series of interviews with key players from across a range of sectors who are involved in discussions about climate change and biodiversity conservation. From these interviews, we have derived a set of 35 statements, which cover many of the important issues that are central to these discussions. This survey is an attempt to find out what people feel about these statements.
Appraisal, Policy Learning and Sustainability: Towards a New Agenda: This study explored different conceptions of the role of appraisal (the ex ante assessment of the environmental or sustainability impacts of projects, plans, programmes and policies), with particular emphasis on ways in which such practices may help to modify the beliefs, values and behaviour of individuals and organisations over time. These questions are of considerable importance at a time when rapid development of policy and practice (including implementation of the European Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive from July 2004) coincides with a range of important new theoretical insights into the nature of appraisal and its role in the political process.
Climate change and lawn growth: Work has recently been completed on a project with the Director of the University Botanic Gardens, Professor John Parker, on the survival of lawns in drought which involved not only the biotic and soil hydrochemical responses but also the psychological attachment to the lawn which actually explains management actions. The main finding was that virtually regardless of the treatment given to a lawn, it will recover from drought with little or no discernible damage. Additionally, leaving grass cuttings on the lawn from spring through to late summer appears to be of benefit by speeding its recovery from drought.
Cultural constructions of nature: This area of research is concerned with the recent move from the purely scientific inputs to environmental management to an understanding of the deeper psychological motivations that are involved in terms of attitudes and values in environmental management (‘psychobiogeography’).
Environmental management and nature conservation in agriculture catchments: Since the early 1980's long-term research has been undertaken at Slapton Ley, Devon with several co-workers, research assistants and postgraduates, mostly involving work on solutes, especially nitrate. The most recent development is work on management decisions based on the role of scientific data and the deeper assumptions about nature. Allied to this project is work on the motivations for the formulation and adoption of agri-environmental schemes in Jersey, as well as work of an on nature conservation on farmland in Cambridgeshire.
Knowledge and Power: Exploring the Science/Society Interface in the Urban Environment Context: A series of seminars explored conceptions of the social and political world that have underpinned major research programmes on urban environments and regeneration (such as NERC's URGENT and EPSRC's Sustainable Cities initiatives). It also gave critical consideration to the concepts of evidence-based policy and interdisciplinarity.
Social Laboratories: Engaging with public dimensions of nanobiotechnology: This project explores the public dimensions of research in nanobiotechnology with the aim of understanding the relationships between science policy, public engagement and nanobiotechnology research in the UK.
The role and influence of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution: This is an ongoing project to analyse the role and influence of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, a standing advisory body created by the Wilson Government in 1970. This work contributes to theories of environmental policy and politics, and helps to develop a theory of policy advice. It also documents the history of a unique institution.

Political Ecology

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.
Agroforestry and sustainability in the humid tropics: Research in the Cambridge Geography Department on the nutrient dynamics of agroforestry in the humid tropics began more than twenty years ago. This research project provides an overview of recent activity.
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.

Society & Development

Changing Identification and Alliances in the Horn of Africa: This research focuses on the social construction of ethnic identity, and on its changing importance in state structures and policies and to individual lives in the Horn of Africa. Research has focused on filling out understandings of the decentralization process in Ethiopia by exploring why and how the Konso people were able to qualify for special 'wereda' status. The research has examined how the decentralization process has impacted on the importance of an ethnic dimension to processes of self-identification, and the extent to which ethnic decentralization has been accompanied by a rise in ethno-nationalism and more chauvinistic and exclusive conceptions of ethnic identity.
Culture and development: Geographies, actors and paradigms: Research under this theme covers changing development thinking, the application of culturally inflected development policy, the position of Andean indigenous peoples in Culture & Development thinking, and critiques of notions of social capital.
Development and Postcolonial governance: Research on this topic covers a number of related themes. Firstly, the ways in national identities have been forged in a context of social diversity, and uneven state sovereignty. Arising out of this has been an on-going interest in examining how geographical knowledges and techniques contribute to the practices and meanings of statehood. In a related field, recent writings have examined the diverse phases and types of neoliberal development, and their impact on the nature of politics, governance and citizen experiences in Ecuador, and Latin America.
Development Harnessing 'Tradition' - Uneasy Partnerships: This area of research has developed out of engagement with the Marena Research Project at Sussex University, and from the longer-term interests in the role of indigenous ritual and political leaders in and political leaders in natural resource management (NRM) in Africa. More specifically, work has been done to study the way in which NGOs (but also government development organizations) have recently turned to 'indigenous' or 'traditional' leaders, such as chiefs or councils of elders, because they see them as providing a convenient vehicle for successful and sustainable NRM.
Geographies of national identities: space and social difference: This research examined two dimensions of national identities, in the context of postcolonial Ecuador.
Geographies of Worker Empowerment in the New Economy: Labour Market Intermediaries in the Call Centre Industry (India and UK): This comparative study of call centre workers in the UK and India examines: (I) the lived experiences of call centre workers across the work-home boundary; (II) labour mobility patterns of call centre workers; and (III) the role of labour market intermediaries in improving labour market outcomes for call centre workers in different national contexts.
Landscape, Culture and Development: Konso, Ethiopia: Interests in development issues and in the history, culture and politics of Africa come together in an in-depth, ethnographic study of the landscape and people of Konso, in southern Ethiopia. The human processes that have constructed the intensive agriculture of Konso, on a range of mountains that rise out of the Rift Valley, are examined. This work has examined the social institutions that organize land and labour, and has identified that Konso ritual leaders, previously thought of by anthropologists as priests, also play a key role in the construction of this intensive agricultural landscape.
Localising International Law: Examining the Public Outreach Strategies of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovin: This project is a two-year investigation into the establishment of the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its outreach strategy to local organisations.
Political economy of development in India: Research in this area develops out of long-standing interests in the political economy of development processes in the Indian sub-continent. This has especially focused on the social and environmental impacts of economic development processes, and how these have been contested at a variety of scales, from local grassroots mobilisation to national policy dialogues.
Political transnationalism and development networks for indigenous people in Andean Ecuador and Bolivia: Research on this topic covers a number of related questions. One is concerned with exploring the meaning, nature and significance of the transnational networks through which development policy oriented to Andean indigenous populations was generated, funded and implemented. A second theme has to do with the nature of transnational political geographies, and their socio-spatial structures and the nature of agency. A third theme is concerned with the changing nature of professionalism in development, associated with neoliberalism and hybrid development institutions.
Sustainable butterfly farming and collecting in Papua New Guinea: The island of New Guinea contains thousands of insect species many of which are eagerly sought by collectors, especially in USA, Germany and Japan. In PNG, out of the 820 known butterfly species, over half are endemic. To meet market demand, insect farming and trading has been carried out for the past 26 years, but little research has been done on its institutional structure, ecological impact or socio-economic effects. This project explores the potential of researched guidelines for better and more co-ordinated policies, and more effective practices by the insect purchasing agencies, in order to generate more substantial rural income benefits and sustainable biodiversity outcomes.
The non-DAC states and the role of public perspectives in shaping the future of development cooperation: An important area of study of the so-called 'traditional' donors concerns public perceptions of foreign aid activities. Key issues include how donor governments and NGOs seek to engage the public; how donor publics perceive the moral and political purposes of foreign aid; and how they understand its impacts and consequences for both donors and recipients. However, this area of enquiry has not, as yet, been directed toward the ‘non-DAC’ development partners.