Emma Jane Lord
Position
PhD candidate
Affiliation
- emma.lord@uib.no
- Visitor address
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Harald Hårfagres gate 1
5007 Bergen - Postal address
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P.O. Box 7805NO-5020 BergenNorway
Emma Jane Lord
Position
PhD candidate
Affiliation
Research groups
Work
Emma’s dissertation narrates the story of how global climate debates and carbon mitigation funding co-joined with development policy for addressing deforestation in Tanzania, using an empirically grounded, locally situated REDD+ pilot project case study. Her work contributes to wider debates on power dynamics and accountability relations in forestry project design, environmental justice, climate justice and reductionism and complexity in the design of the global mechanism of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). By adopting a reflexive engagement with science, using qualitative interviews, participant observation, archival documents and grey literature, she compares her in-depth analysis highlighting contested, unjust and ethically problematic accounts from the local point of view with success claims in the developmental policy rhetoric. This brings to the fore the discrepancy between what developmental actors say and what they do, in the style of Anthropology of Development and drawing from political ecology and environmental justice scholarship.
Emma has a longstanding interest in tropical deforestation. She has a dual award Erasmus Mundus Masters in Sustainable Tropical Forestry from the University of Copenhagen and AgroParisTech in Montpellier. Her undergraduate degree is in Environmental Science from University of Stirling, enabling her to adopt interdisciplinary approaches to research and the social studies of science. She is also interested in humanistic dimensions of land use change including forced evictions within the tropical conservation industry and internal displacement in Colombia. She has an advanced level of Spanish and is interested in comparative approaches to global forest policy, especially in Latin America.
Her recent article Fragmenting forest governance: Land tenure and the REDD+ paradox in Kigoma pilot project, Tanzania was published in Political Geography as part of a Special Issue coordinated by Chr. Michelsen Institute’s anti-corruption group. Prior to taking up her PhD position, in 2018, Emma’s book chapter, Displacement Power and REDD+: A Forest History of Carbonized Exclusion was published in Global Forest Governance and Climate Change by Palgrave Macmillian and introduced readers to injustices caused by global power inequities in forest carbon offsetting. This theme is more deeply explored in her PhD thesis.
Outreach
Panelist in Book launch roundtable Climate change mitigation, politics of deforestation and democratic regression during the 2023 Bergen Exchanges on Law and Social Transformation, 14.08.2023
Presentation of PhD article: Land tenure and the REDD+ paradox: How value grabbing recentralized forest governance in West Tanzania. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton (Zoom - a recording of the presentation is available via the link), 15.06.2022
Opinion piece: Vaksinemotstand i Tanzania kastar lys på Afrikas vaksineutfordringar (Anti-vaccination attitudes highlight Africa's vaccine-related challenges) Bistandsaktuelt, 17.03.202 (in Norwegian)
Blog post: Who can say? Reflections on the unknown in Valle de Cauca, Colombia on the platform Undisciplined Environments. 02.03.2017
Teaching
Emma has taught on Masters level courses at UiB during her PhD position, both at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities and Geography department in the Faculty of Social Sciences.