Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
The Institute of International Studies is pleased to announce the Ford Foundation Environment and Culture Residential Fellowship Program. This program, with the generous support of the Ford Foundation, provides funding to bring scholars/activists to the UC Berkeley campus for periods of one to four months as Residential Fellows.
The Residential Fellowship Program enables individuals who have been deeply involved in practical and applied aspects of environmental politics/policy or resource management to engage in writing projects, to further their training and education, and to take advantage of the faculty, student, and bibliographic resources at UC Berkeley and other Bay Area campuses. Residential Fellows play an integral role in the Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics.
Canada
Helen Corbett has served as Co-director of the Pribilof Resources Project and Director of the Amiq Institute, leading a number of research projects in the Pribilof and Commander Islands. In addition, she has co-created four films on environmental issues in the Bering Sea which have won awards from the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association. Ms. Corbett plans to spend her fellowship time writing a paper exploring the various cycles of human exploitation that have led to the Bering Sea's present crisis: from the Russian-American fur empire, indentured servitude of Aleut hunters, to the modern factory trawler fleet. The paper will be shaped by Ms. Corbett's substantial field experience living and working with Aleut people on islands in the Bering Sea for 18 of the past 20 years.
India
Dr. Deb has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University and has published over 30 papers on environment, ecology, agricultural economics, and forest management. He served as Senior Project Officer for the World Wide Fund for Nature in India for over four years and has been a consultant to the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, the Centre for Island Ecology, the Indian Institute for Management, and the World Bank. Dr. Deb also founded the first non-governmental rice gene bank in eastern India to promote in situ conservation of folk rice varieties. He plans to compare the experiences of this non-governmental effort to document and preserve biodiversity to the experiences of joint forest management programs in India, with which he also has ample first hand experience. The goal of his project is to examine the conditions under which scientific agricultural demonstration projects can influence public policy decisions and local agricultural practices.
Indonesia
Mr. Sangaji has a long-standing commitment to defending community land rights. In the past decade he has co-founded three organizations devoted to strengthening local capacity to successfully advocate for recognition of indigenous people's customary land rights. He has led national-level campaigns opposing forced resettlement of indigenous peoples, the construction of large dams, and environmentally destructive mining activities. Mr. Sangaji will spend time during his fellowship deepening his theoretical understanding of the politics of natural resource management and writing a book on the case of the INCO mining company, which has operations in three provinces in Sulawesi. His study will examine the cultural and political complexities of conflicts over land use and land rights springing from the Canadian company's exploitation of nickel.
Zimbabwe
Ms. Amanda Hammer is a Ph.D. candidate who works with the Center for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she has been part of a research program entitled 'Local Organizations in Rural Poverty Alleviation". Ms. Hammer has over five years of experience working with the Zimbabwean Ministry of Community Development and Women's Affairs as a Planning Officer and with the Ministry of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development as a Policy Analyst. She has also worked as a freelance development consultant for Scandinavian, Dutch and British bilateral donors and various NGOs. Ms. Hammer's proposed research/writing project at UC Berkeley will examine ways to effectively support democratic agrarian transformation and defend human and environmental rights in Zimbabwe. She will focus her analysis on the links between cultural politics, practices of exclusion and belonging, and land and resource claiming processes in the communal areas. The end result of this analysis will be both a journal article and a project proposal suitable for seeking financial support for continued research and advocacy on these issues in Zimbabwe.
Kenya
Ms. Mwangi studied at Kenyatta and Moi Universities in Kenya before beginning her current Ph.D. program in Public Policy at Indiana University. She has worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of World Politics in Washington, DC, and as Research Assistant to the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program at Indiana University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she worked for five years as a research scientist in Forestry for the Kenya Wildlife Service. During her fellowship at Berkeley, Ms. Mwangi will analyze data from a year of fieldwork with the Maasai in Kenya. She will consider how Maasai socio-political institutions are used to influence formal bureaucratic and political institutions to achieve the desired property rights outcomes, focusing on whether environmental considerations factor into these lobbying efforts.
Malaysia
Mr. Wong has worked with the longhouse Dayak tribal communities of Sarawak for the last 18 years, advocating against their continued marginalization. He began his activism as a church pastor and since has coordinated programs for the Society for Christian Service and the Institute for Community Education. Last year he was awarded a Public Intellectual Fellowship from the Institute for International and Malaysia Study at the National University of Malaysia. Because the fast pace of land and forest based development in Malaysia has contributed to increased conflict between authorities, development agencies, and the grassroots forest people who depend on these resources for their livelihoods, Mr. Wong aims to examine ways to effectively resolve these disputes. Specifically, his research and writing at Berkeley will focus on the question of how the local, grassroots position can be strengthened in the conflict resolution process.
Header design by L. Carper, artwork by R. Reen; 1999
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