Clare, you’re a new face in the Department, having arrived at the start of this academic year. What are your first impressions of Geography & Environment, and of LSE more generally?
I am not only new to LSE, but also to London and to a certain extent the UK academic environment, after spending the last thirteen years abroad. I have been working at Utrecht University in The Netherlands for six years, teaching on Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development programmes, and conducting PhD research in Environmental Governance. I’ve been made to feel really welcome in the department and appreciate everyone fielding my many questions on how things work (and always with a smile!). I am really jealous of the students that get to study here! The wide range of courses to choose from mean students can put together a very exciting and challenging programme. I am also impressed by the level of support on offer to help students study, which seems like a really important resource to help them make the most of their time here and, importantly, have fun at the same time. For me personally, it is great to be exposed to different perspectives on the environmental issues I work on. We all need our assumptions to be challenged from time to time to help us refine our thoughts and grow academically, and I look forward to doing that with colleagues and students at LSE.
What areas of the environment does your research focus on?
I am really interested in the governance of natural resources in the Global South. Nine years ago I spent six months volunteering for a small NGO in a rural area of Cambodia with alarming rates of deforestation. My time there made me confront my naïve assumptions about forest dependent communities and opened my eyes to the complexities of managing forest resources. Local teenagers gave me a glimpse into their lives – aspirations, fuel wood collection, hunting, farming, family, school, the looming threat of eviction by illegal and legal logging companies, fetching water, friends, dancing, a sensitive political climate etc. – and it made me question how interventions by NGOs aimed at reducing deforestation play out when confronted with such complex realities. What approaches do NGOs employ when they work with community forest institutions set up to manage forest resources? Can they influence the creation of a supportive policy environment? How can we measure their success? These questions eventually turned into PhD research on interventions in community forestry in three states in India, theoretically informed by common pool resource theory, international development literature and critical institutionalism. Of course this work raised more questions than it could answer and I’m currently exploring angles for future empirical research on how and with what effects NGOs scale out interventions in natural resource management beyond the initial small pockets of success. Having spent most of 2016 writing up my PhD, I’m looking forward to tackling my ‘post PhD reading’ folder and getting back out into the field!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Hopefully I’m lucky enough to still be in a function that allows me to spend my time researching and teaching about the environmental issues I feel passionately about. It is a pretty luxurious position to be in to get to work with intelligent, engaged students whilst developing my own thinking and research on the governance of natural resources. I’m excited to see where my new research project on scaling out NGO interventions in natural resource management takes me and who I’ll get to meet along the way.
Clare Barnes is LSE Fellow in Environment in the Department of Geography & Environment.