About the Program

The Luce Foundation Project on Green Governance
Berkeley Workshop of Environmental Politics, University of California
215 Moses Hall, Berkeley, CA 94702-2308
Contact Liz Carlisle:
lucegreengovernance "at" gmail.com
(510) 642-8757

The Luce Project on Green Governance, Green Peace (2005-2010) has fostered international exchange between the University of California, Berkeley, and research institutions in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil addressing the question of new approaches to environmental policy and law, conflict resolution, and local resource management. Substantively, the project has focused on three common strategic resources: forests, minerals/energy, and water. The three countries represent important points of comparison and the five-year project enables collaborative research, synergistic learning, and cross-national networking.

The project activities build upon on-going experiments in each country on community governance in view of recent democratic transitions, neoliberal reforms, and state decentralization. The project has brought together two innovative lines of thinking about the environment and environmental policy. The first concerns environment and conflict. One thread of this work, environmental security research, views population and poverty as key explanatory variables, but has offered little understanding of the dynamics of specific cases or insight into policy and governance scenarios. Other more generative scholarship on resource politics emphasizes the qualities of specific resource environments, and their extractive systems, and their role in understanding civil conflict, state capacity, and local policy successes and failures. A second thread focuses on decentralized and community-based resource control and the institutions of local or customary management. How, in short, have democratic openings provided opportunities for new institutional links between market forces and local, state, and civic actors? Our project has linked both lines of analysis and rests on a multi-faceted mode of thinking about environments and resources, focusing on localized green governance each of the themes of forests (logging, ranching, land speculation, forest protection), mining (petroleum and the mineral industries), and water (watershed management, water privatization, marine resource management).

The program has been headed by Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Nancy Peluso; Professor of Sociology Peter Evans; and Professor of Geography Michael Watts, of the University of California, Berkeley.

This project has been funded by the Henry Luce foundation, with additional funding from the Institute of International Studies, the College of Natural Resources, and the Offices of the Dean of Social Sciences and Dean of Arts and Humanities.