Presentation of the thesis at the public defence, Sept. 2026
What are those magic moments that make farmers practising alternative agricultures feel that they are doing the right thing? Perhaps it isn’t the headline ideological commitments, but instead little glimpses during the humdrum of daily life. Andrea Mathez unravels these ideas, mixing ethnographic work in Morocco and Switzerland, philosophical considerations of hope, utopia, and enchantment, and embodied participatory engagements with goats, weeds, water and between farmers from the two places.
Ornamental ravintsara trees (front left) in Isoraka, Antananarivo, Madagascar (also: jacaranda, aurucaria…). photo: CK 2022.
You know how sometimes a word or thing appears at the margins of your conscience, associated with some value (good, bad, …), but where you really know nothing about it? For me, this describes ravintsara. Long interested in the Malagasy environment, it is perhaps natural that a tree with a name like that would catch my attention (even a beginner in Malagasy will get that it means “good leaf”). While doing research on fire, agrarian change, and highland reforestation, ravintsara crossed my path plenty in the late 1990s and 2000s, but it was never centre stage. I first encountered it knowingly in 2014, when friends showed me some they had planted a few to ornament their land outside Antananarivo, and they were proud to have something native and not pine or eucalyptus. But strangely, its name was already there in a list of 1000s of plants in an inventory of introduced species in Madagascar that colleagues and I put together. And then since moving to Europe I started noticing ravintsara in the essential oils section of French pharmacies.
Chanelle Adam’s PhD, just defended, shows there is history and reason behind my encounters and confusions. It turns out that the botanical and chemical identity of the tree has only been established for three decades or so. Ravintsara was indeed introduced to Madagascar, probably in the 19th century (it is better known elsewhere as the camphor laurel, Camphora officinarum, source of camphor oil). And yet… the variety growing in Madagascar turns out to be a chemotype specific to Madagascar called 1,8-cineole, which is low in camphor oil and high in cineole (also found in eucalypts, rosemary, and bay leaves). To confuse matters further, the endemic tree Cryptocarya agathophylla (also used for essential oils) was previously called ravensara (though not by locals) and confusion between two persists. As environmental programs proliferated on the island in the 1990s and 2000s, the search was on for local trees to reforest the island, and ravensara/ravintsara was a prime candidate (hence my encounter on my friends’ plot in the peripheries of Tana). And with development programs entering the 2000s looking for “win-win” solutions for both environment and livelihoods, essential oil distillation was widely promoted – especially as local distillers and scientists (perhaps benefitting from long-term French investments and know-how in the fragrance, oil, and pharmaceutical arena) had set the groundwork in previous decades, themselves building on and branching from colonial era industries (ylang-ylang, cloves, vanilla…). Hence the little ravintsara bottles in French pharmacies. This all leads up to the opening scene of Chanelle’s thesis, the time when during the height of the Covid 19 crisis the just-deposed President of Madagascar himself claimed to have a cure for the coronavirus – a concoction based in part on ravintsara. And that’s a story that Chanelle tells much better than me!
Visiting a community-managed forest in upland A Luoi districtThe head of the provincial forest service opens the workshop
Our FT Viet project recently held a science-policy workshop on forest change and sustainability. After over five years of project activities, it was a chance to report on project outcomes and bring together key actors to reflect on the trends, direction, and sustainability of forest management in Vietnam. The 40+ people assembled in a hotel conference room in Hue on June 9 included people working at the national level in Hanoi, others from Thua Thien Hue and nearby provinces in the north Central region, and local stakeholders. There were university researchers and leaders, officials from the national payments for ecosystem services program, conservationists, leaders of forest certification programs, NGOs, and, of course, state foresters in their green uniforms.
I am pleased to announce Astrid Oppliger’s successful public defence of her PhD thesis entitled Production, Circulation and Application of Scientific Knowledge: Forest Hydrology and Policy-Making in Chile. Her thesis addresses debates over forest plantations and water scarcity. She focusses on her native Chile’s forest plantation sector, where vast areas of “water sucking” eucalyptus plantations gained attention as the country struggles with multi-year droughts. She is particularly interested in how science interacts with policy, notably in the governance of the environment by diverse actors across industry, the state, and academia. She draws on the intersection of two main academic schools – political ecology and STS (science and technology studies) – to trace the ways in which scientific knowledge on forest hydrology is produced, circulated, and applied in the multi-actor governance of eucalyptus plantations. Here’s an interview on her work in the university’s magazine Uniscope.
More good news on the PhD front: David Amuzu today passed his public defence with flying colours. David’s research revolves around the transformations in rural production systems in the cocoa forests of Ghana caused by the arrival of ‘sustainability certification programs’ led by chocolate companies. These are the kinds of programs that lie behind the labels on chocolate bars that guarantee that they were produced in rainforest-friendly, non-exploitative ways. He investigates how a firm-led sustainability program has inserted itself into the local landscape and with what sorts of social and agro-ecological consequences. He is particularly interested in the underlying power relations and imbricated social processes that can explain and highlight the dynamic social negotiations and (sometimes) injustices hidden behind sustainability certificates. The four results chapters focus on different consequences of the arrival and operation of the sustainability scheme, ranging from changes to governance institutions and local agrarian relations (Ch 3), the creation of benefits for and burdens on farmers (Ch 4), the obfuscation of land access relations (Ch 5), and blockages in on-farm tree conservation (Ch 6).
I am thrilled to announce that Nguyen Thi Hai Van has successfully defended her PhD. Using a political ecology approach, Van investigated the dramatic changes in the forest landscapes of A Luoi, a mountainous district in the central coast of Vietnam. In this humid tropical landscape, natural forests were destroyed by war and logging, but forest cover has rebounded in the last 20 years due to widespread acacia plantations as well as conservation activities in remaining forests. Much of these changes have been attributed to successive state policies and programs, such as the allocation of forest lands to local people, the massive promotion of reforestation, and the implementation of ecosystem service payment schemes. Van, however, looks “under the hood” of the successive layers state policies to see how they translate into specific outcomes in specific places in conjunction with local aspirations and economic pressures. In the end, she argues that not only has the forest been transformed, but also the people – with ‘new forest people’ undertaking new livelihoods with new identities.
With pride and pleasure I’d like to announce the successful doctorate of Mialy Andriamahefazafy, which she defended publicly on July 13. Mialy’s previous work with a marine conservation organisation in coastal Madagascar showed her that local fishers were complaining about big boats fishing offshore, while in the inland capital, government officials were keen on the revenue they could gain through access agreements with foreign tuna fleets. This inspiration led to her thesis work, in which investigated the socio-material matrix through which fishing occurs. She narrowed in on three main topics: how diverse actors ‘access’ the fish, how these actors ‘narrate’ their concerns over overfishing, and whether there is any sense in approaching this issue by appealing to a sense of ‘regional identity’. Mialy undertook fieldwork in three countries (Madagascar, Seychelles, and Mauritius), interviewing more than 223 individuals including small-scale fishers, industrial boat captains and sailors, government officials, cannery workers, retailers and more. Mialy also observed landings of tuna in ports both big and small, and practiced event ethnography by joining delegations to attend two international negotiations.
I’m proud to announce the successful public PhD defence of Hélène Weber, who has worked with me for five years as a doctoral assistant. Hélène researched a practice operating in the spatial, cultural, and political margins of Swiss agriculture: sheep farming. She investigated the on-going transformation of sheep farming in Switzerland, pushed by eco-modernist policies, market institutions and demands, and also by the actors themselves and their practices and relationships (farmers, herders, sheep, grass, dogs…). Hélène’s intuition was that an ethnographic, practice-centred approach to her topic would give different and complementary insights.
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