Forests as pathways to prosperity: The contribution of forests to mitigating poverty by supporting current consumption and helping to meet basic needs in the face of seasonal, climatic, or other stressors is increasingly well understood. But to what extent can forests provide a means for rural households to escape poverty? And can forests provide a pathway to prosperity that includes more widely shared economic benefits and improvements in other aspects of human well-being such as health, food security, and political empowerment? With colleague Daniel Miller at Notre Dame, we completed a Special Issue of World Development to provide new analytical frameworks, empirical insights, and theoretical understanding to advance knowledge of forest-poverty linkages.  I was also part of the IUFRO Global Forest Expert Panel on Forests and Poverty, working on synthesizing the levers of change that have been used globally to reduce poverty in forest-reliant contexts, as well as policy implications and research frontiers in this space.

Past project: Gendered impacts of large-scale land transactions: Contemporary large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), also called land grabs, are historically unprecedented in their scale and pace. They have provoked robust scholarly debates and prompted social unrest in a number of countries. Critics point to their negative social impacts whereas advocates highlight potential improvements in agricultural productivity, and their contributions to agricultural transformations through technological spillovers. We draw upon the implementation of four LSLTs in two regional states of Ethiopia to analyze their gendered effects. This work was done in collaborations with International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI), the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), and the Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute (EEFRI).