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.
Power (to decide, implement, resist, inform, convince, …) is needed for good environmental management and nature conservation. It is often contested. Power is also sometimes hard to grasp – it can be held by certain people, by rules, by institutions, by ideas, or even by discourses. This new paper, fruit of a workshop organised by Ross Shackleton here at the University of Lausanne and fruitful exchanges between the co-authors, tries to clarify questions of power and proposes six guiding principles approaching power in conservation research and practice.
During a recent visit to Antananarivo, I had the privilege of presenting my work on fire to a diverse audience of researchers and policymakers (some around the seminar table, others online). While the presentation largely drew on my now dated work for Isle of Fire, the detailed discussion very much linked it to events in 2022, including terrible forest fires at Ankarafantsika and annual smoke emergencies in the capital.
Field burning near Beira, Mozambique (C. Kull, 2010)
I am happy to announce that we have received funding from SNIS (Swiss Network for International Studies) for a new project. Principal member of the project is fire ecologist and remote sensing specialist Víctor Fernández-García, with collaborators at the universities of Antananarivo, Eduardo Mondlane, Swansea, Lausanne, and Léon, and at FAO and SANParks.
Bushfire is often seen as symbolic of environmental catastrophe on Madagascar. But is it? A global comparison of fire regimes based on satellite image data suggests care in jumping to such conclusions. A recent article in Global Change Biology, led by Leanne Phelps and to which I contributed, finds that the island’s fire regimes have analogues to 88% of fire regimes in the global tropics with similar climate and vegetation. Madagascar’s fires, while exceptionally vilified, are not exceptional. It also demonstrates that the large, landscape-scale grassland fires common across highland and western Madagascar have no relationship to forest loss; indeed forest loss occurs in places without large-scale fires.
Figure 3 from Phelps et al. (2022). Colours represent areas with similar fire regimes (clustered based on burnt area, fire size, seasonality, and numbers of fires). Black pixels represent fire regimes not found on Madagascar. Gray pixels are places without landscape-scale fire regimes. Photos: (a) tapia branch and chameleon at Ibity, (b) uncontrolled, peri-urban landscape fire in Ambositra [photo C. Kull, 2019], (c) a forest-savanna boundary in Ambohitantely, (d) ancient biodiverse grasslands on Ibity, (e) landscape fire in an agricultural region near Ambositra, likely for grassland renewal [photo by C. Kull, 1998/9], (f) tree cover on a forest-savanna boundary in Ambohitantely, (g) smallholder land use on Ibity.Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent doctoral reading group here at the University of Lausanne, we discussed the 1987 text by Blaikie and Brookfield titled Land Degradation and Society, which is often cited as the foundational text for the field of political ecology. Comparing that groundbreaking work with current discussions under the political ecology label shows both continuities and new trends. Continuities include concern over environmental change and a ‘double posture’ of engaging with science on the issue at hand as well as a critical perspective with that science (for instance measuring soil degradation as well as asking what that concept means); concerns with the impacts of capitalism and colonialism; attention to property systems etc etc. Newer trends include the full-blown arrival of various approaches steeped in continental philosophy (poststructuralism, actor networks, assemblages, hegemony, bare life, governmentality….) and in diverse intersectional and decolonial postures. But where is the field now?
Together with Charlie Shackleton, I am updating our 2011 global study of the adoption, use, and perception of non-native Australian acacias in landscapes around the world. We seek to identify changes and trends in the presence of these trees and how they have been welcomed (or not), and used (or not). To that effect, we have prepared a brief online survey.
Have you ever discussed schools and universities with someone from another country or even institution, and gotten confused over terminology? Words like college, faculty, credit, … while generally sharing latin roots, have taken on different meanings around the world. In this blog post, I try to make sense of it all, using my experiences from Switzerland, France, Australia, US, and Canada, and what I’ve learned from elsewhere.
Congratulations to the team from the “Forest4Climate&People” project at ESSA-Forêts (University of Antananarivo) and the School of Natural Sciences (Bangor University) for this fantastic short film. It is both beautifully done and really informative. Wonderful images as well as guitar picking by D’Gary. And most of all, it has a strong and clear message, contained in the subtitle, that advocates “putting local people at the heart of decisions about tropical forest’s contribution to tackling climate change”.
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).
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Christian Kull 