Sixth Al-Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding – Nancy Peluso

Oct 25, 2019 | Environmental Peacebuilding Association, American University, ELI, and UN Environment Programme
Irvine, CA

Nancy Lee Peluso is an expert in resource management policy with a strong interest in how regional histories and social factors like ethnicity, class, and gender play a role in natural resource management and conflict. She is currently the Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor in Forest Policy at UC Berkeley. She has published widely on the political ecology of Southeast Asian forestry and resources conflicts, as well as natural resources, land distribution and control, and resource management more broadly. These publications include Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java, Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development (written with Christine Padoch), and the edited volumes Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, People and Nature in a Neoliberal Age (edited with Joseph Nevins) and New Frontiers of Land Control (edited with Christian Lund).

Her book, Violent Environments, co-edited with Michael Watts, seeks to determine where social factors begin and end within environmental conflicts, particularly as they relate to environmental foreign policy. The book has been widely cited and is acclaimed for its ethnographic approach to understanding environmental violence.

These publications exemplify Dr. Peluso’s wide-ranging work that has brought together understandings of land, violence, resource access, power, and political economy to answer crucial questions about the causes of conflicts, and the ways in which addressing political, social, racial, and gender inequalities can decrease conflict.

Her work has been important in developing a complex understanding of the ways in which social difference affects resource access and control, and the ways in which conflict, power, and resource access are intertwined, especially around forests. For example, her recent work examined the role of gender in forest spaces in East Java, and the political, social, and historical context of small-scale gold mining in West Kalimantan.

Dr. Peluso has also established a student consortium pursuing research projects that explore the maintenance and handling of land-based resources. The collective is known as the Land Lab and it combines a diverse set of interests and research in order to strengthen the study of political ecology and socio-natural worlds. Collectively, they seek to understand how the landscape history and communal conflicts inform territorialization. Dr. Peluso is also spearheading the study of how groups of people including governments and independent actors manage natural resources.

The Al-Moumin Award and Distinguished Lecture of Environmental Peacebuilding recognizes leading thinkers who are shaping the field of environmental peacebuilding. It is named after Dr. Mishkat Al-Moumin, Iraq’s first Minister of Environment, a human rights and environment lawyer.