I am Executive Officer of the Global Land Programme, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern, and Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. In addition to my work coordinating the GLP community, my research interests include governance of distally connected socio-ecological systems (telecoupling); land tenure and relation to land use and cover change; forest governance and conflict; and carbon conservation schemes such as REDD+ in the context of global climate change policies and development issues. I am also Principal Investigator on a recently awarded grant from the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) program, “The Global Rush for Land: A Socio-Ecological Synthesis” Principle Investigator (2017-2020).
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Urban-rural interactions, Land use and conflict
A grand, integrated theory of land system change remains elusive. Yet, this paper shows that middle-range theories – defined as contextual generalizations that describe chains of causal mechanisms explaining a well-bounded range of phenomena, as well as the conditions that trigger, enable, or prevent these causal chains –, provide a path towards generalized knowledge of land systems. This knowledge can support progress towards sustainable social-ecological systems.
There are no accepted guidelines for detecting biases or logical gaps between 'generalized knowledge claims' (GKC’s) and the evidence used to produce them. In this important new article in Global Environmental Change, several GLP Members propose a typology of GKCs based on their evidence base and the process by which they are produced.
During a summer school focusing on land system science, a group of young scholars from around the world spent an entire week getting to grips with data, tools and models for analysing landscape patterns and processes.
The first of a series of Future Earth Natural Assets Knowledge Action Network (KAN) workshops was held this past September 12-13 at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
