Task Force Members

Janis Alcom: is a biologist and anthropologist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, working as an independent consultant for various clients including the Garfield Foundation. She is an internationally-recognized expert with over thirty years experience in twenty-two countries in Asia, Africa, South Pacific, and the Americas. Her publications include five books and over 100 papers on conservation, tropical forest management, agroecology, democratic governance, indigenous peoples, human rights, human ecology, social movements, resilience, and related policies. She has worked for universities, NGOs, bilateral and multilateral donors, and private funders in program management, project design and evaluation, grants management, technical assistance, and policy analysis. She is an Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and is currently president-elect of the Anthropology and Enviroment section of the American Anthropological Association. At present, she is assisting local NGOs and grassroots organizations in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina.

Email: janisalcorn@yahoo.com

Deborah Barry: I am a cultural and economic geographer from the US and have spent most of my professional life working (and living) in Latin America. My most direct experience has been in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico in rural development and policy (as a practitioner, international consultant and researcher) with a focus that changed over the years from agriculture to community forestry. Interests include the challenges/evolution of local organizations and institutions in natural resource management\production\markets and community governance systems. How they interact politically and in the larger policy spheres is something that continues to fascinate me. During the last decade or so in Central America I helped set up several research institutions, the last of which (PRISMA- Regional Program for Environment and Development Studies) is attempting to understand the territorial dynamics of global trends on and with rural communities and social movements.

I recently returned to the US, after seven years with Ford Foundation at the Mexico/Central America office, where I worked in the Environment and Development field, which also provided great opportunities to get involved in China, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa through collaborative grantmaking and advocacy. I am currently a Senior Research Associate with the Governance Program at CIFOR, based in Washington, DC where I work closely with the Rights and Resources Initiative (a global collaborative partnership between many - including IUCN, Forest Trends/RRGroup, CIFOR, ICRAF, RECOFTC and others), to help get/keep community rights to tenure, access and benefits from forestlands and resources on the international agenda. Latest research, a co-edited book ..." The Community Forests of Mexico: Managing for Sustainable Landscapes."

Email: d.barry@cgiar.org

Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend: My Ph.D. is in physics but I also have a Master in Public Health (UC Berkeley) where we actually started an international health programme focusing on the environmental/ economic/ cultural-political roots of public health. It is through that perspective that I moved into environmental policy and practice. In 1993 I was called to develop the IUCN Social Policy Programme and I did so, focusing on co-management and community management. Moving out of the IUCN secretariat into the Commissions actually allowed me more independence and effectiveness. With CMWG, TILCEPA and TGER (all dedicated Commission themes and working groups) we managed to support a variety of innovations in IUCN policy and even CBD policy about co-management of natural resources and protected areas, community conserved areas and—broadly—equity in conservation. Throughout this, I have published a bit too much. Some of my titles are: The Wealth of Communities (1994); Our People, our Resources (1996); Co-management of Protected Areas (1996); Beyond Fences (1997); Co-management of Natural Resources (2000); Indigenous and Local Communities, Equity and Protected Areas (2004); and Sharing Power (2004). I publish the thoughts and experiences of many people around particular subjects in dedicated issues of the CEESP journal: Policy Matters. The most recent volumes have focused on “Community Empowerment for Conservation”, “History, Culture and Conservation” and “Poverty, Wealth and Conservation”. All of the above, or nearly all, can be found by navigating the CEESP site. At present I divide time between volunteer work as vice-chair of CEESP and WCPA, paid work as consultant and, again, volunteer work as chair of the board of a small humanitarian foundation.
Email: gbf@cenesta.org

Louise Buck: My interests are in people in productive landscape mosaics that include forests, how mixed landscapes can be managed to conserve the resources that sustain them and to support the people who depend on them. My MS and PhD degrees are in natural resources with minors in several social sciences.

My entry point for this line of work was in Kenya where, in the late 1970s I entered the realm of agroforestry through ICRAF and CARE, via research I conducted with The Beijer Institute, on energy, environment and equity in eastern Africa. I spent the 1980s with these organizations working in 10 countries and learning about participatory technology generation, community based conservation and development, and protected area management via ICDPs. This led in the 1990s to my engagement with the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD) and the Department of Natural Resources where I remain at present, and with CIFOR for a decade as an associate scientist. I have learned and taught about ecological knowledge systems, social learning, adaptive collaborative management, decentralized governance, forest farming, and most recently, ecoagriculture.

As coordinator of the Cornell Ecoagriculture Working Group (EWG) I facilitate collaboration between Ecoagriculture Partners (NGO), faculty and students at Cornell, and a variety of stakeholders to develop monitoring systems for assessing the performance of landscape mosaics in delivering agriculture and forest production, biodiversity conservation, and local livelihood benefits. Ideally the systems will help to build social capital and capacities for coordinated management.

Email: leb3@cornell.edu

Jane Carter: I have a degree in Agricultural and Forest Sciences, and did my doctorate on local (indigenous) knowledge of people in the hills of Nepal about tree use and tree cultivation. This involved a 1.5 year period of fieldwork in a Nepali village, a very special experience. It was a long time ago now, though - and between the degree and the doctorate I worked in Kenya (briefly), Sri Lanka and Australia on forestry matters. After the doctorate, I joined Gill Shepherd, Mary Hobley and Edwin Shanks on the Rural Development Forestry Network at ODI. We all combined our time between research and networking activities, sometimes with a bit of teaching thrown in - the most significant piece of work I did was a Study Guide on forest resource assessment, although a much smaller piece of work, de-bunking alley farming, was something on which I received perhaps the greatest feedback.

In 1995, we moved to Switzerland as a family, and shortly afterwards I began working for Intercooperation - the organisation for which I still work. We are a Swiss non-profit making foundation, implementing projects in developing countries and countries in transition on behalf of the Swiss government and others. My main responsibility has been in back-stopping community/collaborative forestry projects - in Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Bhutan; I also did a review of collaborative forest management for the World Bank that was eventually published by CIFOR. I was posted to India between late 2002 and January 2006, and returned to our head office in Berne in February 2006. Since then, I have been working on knowledge management within the organisation, on pro-poor policy and livelihood issues, as well as maintaining a support function in community-based forest management/forest governance for the Nepal Swiss Community Forestry Project, our forestry project in Ukraine, FORZA, and other projects on request - one example being the Manompana Project in Madagascar, which is a site under the CIFOR landscape mosaics programme.

Email: jane.carter@intercooperation.ch

Marcus Colchester: Marcus Colchester received his doctorate in social anthropology at University of Oxford in 1982 and has carried out extensive field research in applied anthropology in Amazonia, South and South-East Asia. His human rights advocacy related to development and conservation has earned him a Pew Conservation Fellowship and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology. He is a founder member of the World Rainforest Movement and is Director of the Forest Peoples Programme, and has carried out numerous consultancies for international organisations. He has published extensively in academic and NGO journals and is the author and editor of numerous books, often with other people, including ‘Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Biodiversity Conservation’ ;‘Guyana: Fragile Frontier - Loggers, Miners and Forest Peoples’; ‘Justice in the Forest – rural livelihoods and forest law enforcement’.

Current activities closely related to the work of the Task Force include:
- FPP's Legal and Human Rights Programme
- FPP's Responsible Money programme
- FPP's 6 country programme on community-based implementation of CBD Article 10c
- Rights and Resources Initiative (we joined after the Bali meeting)
- Co-chair of the newly launched High Conservation Value Resources Network
- Joint Team Leader, with Sawit Watch, of the Task Force on Smallholders of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
Email: marcus@forestpeoples.org

Carol J. Pierce Colfer (Task Force Leader): I’m an anthropologist (PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle), with decades of experience in Indonesia, the Middle East, and the US. Since joining CIFOR in 1994, I’ve also had a fair amount of involvement in Africa and South America. My current interests focus on health and forests, gender, population issues (I also have an MPH, International Public Health, University of Hawaii). I’ve been actively involved with devolution issues recently, and had years of experience leading/supervising adaptive collaborative management in forests in 11 countries---with recent emphasis on linking communities and district level government thru participatory action research at both levels. I am currently the “theme leader” on governance and biodiversity in diverse landscapes, as part of a global “biodiversity platform” (with sites in 6 countries); and responsible for CIFOR’s Rights and Resources Initiative project (with sites in 12 countries).

Email: c.colfer@cgiar.org

Michael R. Dove: Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology, Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Anthropology in the Peabody Museum, and Coordinator of the joint doctoral degree program between the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Anthropology Department at Yale University. My research focuses on the environmental relations of local communities in less-developed countries, especially in South and Southeast Asia. My most recent books are Conserving Nature in Culture: Case Studies from Southeast Asia (Yale Southeast Asia Program 2005, coedited with P. Sajise and A. Doolittle) and Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (Blackwell 2007, coedited with C. Carpenter). I have in press a book on the fire-climax grasslands of Southeast Asia (N.Y. Botanical Gardens) and am at work on books on the vernacular dimensions of conservation in Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, co-edited with P. Sajise and A. Doolittle) and the historic participation of remote Bornean tribes in global commodity production (Yale University Press). One of my major, current research projects, in collaboration with colleagues in Indonesia, focuses on the cultural and political aspects of natural hazards and disasters in Central Java. Another ongoing research activity, collaboratively conducted with members of my doctoral lab, consists of a theoretical critique of key academic and policy concepts in conservation and development, including the local/global divide, politics-free science, and the equilibrium/post-equilibrium shift. Other research and teaching interests include the global circulation of environmental concepts; political dimensions of resource degradation; indigenous environmental knowledge; contemporary and historical environmental relations in South and Southeast Asia; the study of developmental and environmental institutions, discourses, and movements; and the sociology of resource-related sciences.

Email: michael.dove@yale.edu

B. Fisher is an anthropologist. He specialises in social and political ecological aspects of natural resource management, particularly involving community forestry. After working in Nepal with the then Nepal-Australia Forestry Project in the late 1980s, he taught at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, before becoming Deputy Director of the Regional Community Forestry Training Center in Bangkok from 1997 to 2001. He is currently Senior Researcher with the Australian Mekong Resource Centre at the University of Sydney. Bob has been involved in research and consultancies in a wide variety of countries, including Mozambique, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. He was the lead author of “Poverty and Conservation: Landscapes, People and Power’ (IUCN 2005) and has a strong interest in action research.

Email: rjfisher@ozemail.com.au

Louise Fortmann: I am a rural sociologist. I have spent roughly 11 years working in east and southern Africa, on community management of forests since 1991 in Zimbabwe. I also have done work on poverty, property and forestry/forest management in northern California.

Email: fortmann@nature.berkeley.edu

Irene Guijt: I have a background in irrigation and soil/water conservation engineering at Wageningen University. This fueled my interest in people, dialogue and change processes which is where my link to this group lies. My MSC research in Brazil at the time was on landless people in the dry Northeast and the all-important issue of social cohesion to carve out a sustainable future together. Since then, I’ve been university/research based, with 8 years at the International Institute for Environment and Development where all my work included some form of participatory planning, participatory research, action research, etc, which continues to this day. So I guess I am a bit of a methodologist at heart.

I was fortunate enough to spend 1.5 years in Canberra in the late 1990s at ANU’s Department of Forestry creating and kick-starting a new course on Participatory Resource Management and doing some work on agroforestry pioneers in the hinterlands of Australia.

Since 1999, I have been an independent consultant while working on/off on my PhD. My core interest lies with learning processes and systems in rural development and natural resource management, particularly where this involves collective action. This is also the focus of our Task Force’s first publication, an recently edited book based on CIFOR’s ACM work called Negotiated Learning: Collaborative Monitoring in Forest Resource Management. I have also worked with NRM-focused, small and large organisations, organizational learning strategies and processes, collaborative M&E, policies for rural/agricultural development, participatory planning methodologies, and training.

Email: iguijt@learningbydesign.org

Marilyn Hoskins: I am an anthropologist with a communications background. Most of my professional life has been in the area of local governance and community development with equity, especially in relation to the interface between local women and men and the tree and forest resources upon which many of them depend.

I lived and worked five years in Southeast Asia and five in West Africa, and have worked in community development in more than 40 other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as in the United States.

In the late 1970s I helped design the UN community forestry program and became Senior Forestry Officer heading the Community Forestry Unit based in the Policy and Planning Division of the Forestry Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization. I also coordinated the global Forestry for Local Community Development and the Forests, Trees and People Programs until the late 1990s.

Returning to the States I have spent several years at Indiana University as a Scholar in Residence with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and now as a Research Associate living in Washington, DC. I teach, write and do consulting for a variety of organizations. Currently I am contributing to a chapter of a World Bank document on community based forest resource management.

Email: marilynndc@aol.com

Gun Lidestav: Coming from the a place near the polar circle (the city of Umeå, Sweden) , and with little experience of working in tropical and/or developing countries (one year as volontare in Costa Rica) my background might also be a bit "offside". However, I have been dealing with rural development issues in remote/marginalized communities in Sweden for many years. As I'm a forester by profession and senior researcher, my focus has been on the use of forest land and forest resources in relation to people’s wellbeing. In the 80ies I was involved in action research in some municipalities in Mid Sweden. We tried to find new ways of developing work opportunities based on small scale forestry. Later on I wrote my PhD thesis on Municipality Forestry Planning with a participatory planning approach (although I did not know of the concept then) with the ambition that the municipalities would use their forests for the best (interest) of their inhabitants. During the last 10 years I have developed an interest in gender aspect and the development of a gender perspective in forestry science. Together with Carol Colfer and Janet Chaseling (statistician from Griffith University, Brisbane) I coordinate the IUFRO WP 6.08.01 "Gender Research in Forestry". Some of the work that is going on in this network should be of relevance for this task force. At the moment I'm supervising a handful of PhD students who deals with different aspects on social-economical and ecological sustainable land use in remote municipalities in Northern Sweden. I belive that the research findings from this work might be interesting inputs to this task force.
Email: gun.lidestav@ssko.slu.se

Maureen Lines: Maureen Lines, Director of Kalash Environmental Protection Society (KEPS) and Project Director of Hindu Kush Conservation Association, UK (HKCA), also vice chairperson Frontier Heritage Trust. North West Frontier Province, Pakistan website: www.hindukushconservation.com Maureen has lived and worked in the the Kalash valleys for the past 27 years.
She is a writer and a qualified emergency medical technician, having trained and qualified in New York City. Born in London in 1937, she is now a citizen of Pakistan. Maureen is also a writer of several books and writes frequently for the Pakistan press.
She is an environmentalist and has campaigned against both the timber and building mafias. When possible, she prefers to work with government, believing that the rights of the people are best addressed when government and civil society work together.
Email: molines@brain.net.pk

James Mayer: I am Head of the Natural Resources Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), based in the UK. IIED is a policy research organisation and I have been there since 1993. I work on forestry and rural development issues, emphasising rights and governance and practical political tactics for managing natural resources. The Natural Resources Group consists of about 20 full time staff and in addition to forestry we work on drylands, biodiversity and agriculture issues. I handle various collaborations with partners in multi-country initiatives including: Instruments for Sustainable Private Sector Forestry; Developing Markets for Improved Watershed Services and Livelihoods; Small-Medium Forestry Enterprises for Poverty Reduction and Sustainability; and the Forest Governance Learning Group. Work has taken me to a good range of countries – primarily in Africa and South Asia. I am lead or co-author of several books including: Policy That Works for Forests and People, Forestry Tactics, Raising the Stakes (about forestry in South Africa), Company-Community Forestry Partnerships, The Sustainable Forestry Handbook and Plantations, privatisation, poverty and power.

Email: James.Mayers@iied.org

Cynthia McDougall: My undergraduate studies were in Comparative Development and Political Science at Trent University, with an emphasis on community development. I was engaged in a year long course on community development that focused on participatory action research - both as a subject and as our mode of operating. The course drew especially from Paulo Freire’s work in Latin America, and galvanized my interest in/commitment to such issues and approaches. My Masters was in Environment and Development at Cambridge U, with a focus on food security and global equity, specifically looking at the implications of certain GATT (WTO) agreements on local farmers’ incentives and capacity to continue to protect and enhance genetic diversity of food crops.

After working on food security, and biodiversity and other environmental law issues, and as an environmental and experiential educator based in Vancouver, BC, I moved to Indonesia in 1997 to join CIFOR. My main involvement at CIFOR has been in issues of community forestry and adaptive and collaborative management, including self-monitoring and social learning. My special interest in this has been both in the governance process development/analysis as well as the implications for equity between genders and for marginalized peoples. I moved to Vancouver Island, Canada in 2002, as a CIFOR ‘Senior Associate’, and have been the (long distance) team leader of the CIFOR-IDRC project on Adaptive Collaborative Management of Community Forests in Nepal since 2003.

Email: c.mcdougall@cgiar.org

Ravi Prabhu: I’m a forester with an initial specialization in ecological silviculture, but over the last decade or so I have been drawn to working on research projects that have very strong systems approaches and significant ‘people components’, such as criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management or adaptive collaborative management of forests. A couple of weeks ago I transited from being a CIFOR employee (I was the Regional Coordinator for Eastern and Southern Africa) to being a Senior Associate. I am currently one of the Co-Facilitators of the CGIAR’s Medium Term Plan for Eastern and Southern Africa (this is part of the CGIAR’s effort to restructure itself) and am based in Harare (Zimbabwe) for the time being. I recently helped to write a book ( Vanclay, Prabhu, Sinclair) that Earthscan published this month, Realizing Community Futures: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Natural Resources. It was our attempt at trying to bridge the divide between research and practitioners. Building bridges of this sort is what has attracted me to the potential of the Taskforce.

Email: r.prabhu@cgiar.org

Mustofa Agung Sardjono. Basically I’m a forester with specific fields of soil science (B.Sc.) and forest ecology (Ir.). But then I was more interested to focus on how to optimize the interrelationship between forests and surrounding people especially in the ‘hearth’ of tropical region of Indonesia for my Doctorate dissertation at Hamburg University (1990). As one of the founders of the Center for Social Forestry (1997) I have been in charge as the director since 2004. Although social forestry is my main field as a professor at the Faculty of Forestry, Mulawarman University (since 1983) my lecture duty covers also forest sociology and forest politics. My extended experiences in different countries and especially through short and long-term stays as visiting scholar at Melbourne University (2001-2002), UC Berkeley (2005) and as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo (2007) have supported my duties. Intensive collaborations with other academicians, researchers (e.g. from CIFOR and WAC), private sectors, official institutions and even different local as well as international NGOs who work primarily with community based forest management, environment and land/resource tenure issues have given me opportunities to do more for the sustainability of forest resources and improved welfare of communities.
Email: ma_sardjono@telkom.net

Gil Shepherd: I began life as an English language and literature major (Oxford), but teaching English in the Sudan in the 1960s got me interested in Africa, the drylands, Islam and much else, and I returned to the UK, and did an LSE PhD in Social Anthropology. (Afro-Arab traders and migrants along the East African coast, and ultimately across the Indian Ocean to south-east Asia.) I taught Anthropology, worked for Oxfam in the Sudan and East Africa, and then for the UK Department for International Development, where I first worked on social aspects of forestry.

This led to a long-term career at the Overseas Development Institute in London from 1985 onwards. Here I established both ODI's Forest Policy and Environment Programme, and the Rural Development Forestry Network. My earlier research at ODI focused mainly upon tropical dry forests and related issues such as fuelwood provision, followed by many years' work in community and participatory forest management, and local people's forest conservation and management practices.

While spending some years on the importance of international forest and development policies and their potential for leverage at country level, I have remained most interested in the local-to-national-level end of the spectrum. My two most recent projects have involved firstly (for the World Bank) the development of a toolkit for the measurement of poverty among forest-dependent people, and for ways to translate the data generated into evidence for PRSP and NFP processes. Secondly (for IUCN) I have been managing a series of case studies on the application of the CBD's Ecosystem Approach as a tool for landscape and livelihood analysis.

I'm currently a Senior Research Associate at ODI, and the thematic leader for the Ecosystem Approach in IUCN's Commission on Ecosystem Management.

Pete Taylor: I'm particularly interested in issues of environmental governance, community-based organization and their articulation with the market. Over the last three years, I've been involved with the CIFOR-sponsored, Ford Foundation supported project on grassroots forest organizations, with Peter Cronkleton, Deborah Barry, Marianne Schmink and others. This project supported collaborative research between external professional researchers and community-based researchers in Central America and Brazil, and aimed in particular to help assess how external technical support might more effectively support building community capacities for conservation and development management. We are working now on several publications emerging from the first phase of this effort, and are about to begin a second phase. In addition to collaborative work related to these projects, I've also been working more directly with one of the Guatemalan grassroots organizations on issues of integrated forest management, a strategy they express interest in pursuing.

Anne Marie Tiani: I studied ecology and Botany in Yaounde University. I started teaching natural sciences in High schools in 1982. After I got my doctorate degree in 1989, I gradually shifted to local NGOs, helping them develop or assess the environmental component of their projects. In 1996, I got the opportunity to be trained on participatory methods and tools by WWF-US. This was the turning-point of my career. The same year, I was hired by CIFOR as consultant, for developing and testing Criteria and indicators for community managed forests (1996-7), then for developing and testing social science methods and tools, under the supervision of Carol Colfer (1997-8).

Since 2000, I have been involved in many CIFOR activities and in two main research programs :(i) Adaptive Collaborative Management of Tropical forests (ACM)-Cameroon program. In this ACM program, I was coordinating the protected areas (PAs) management thematic research, and responsible for gender issues and Criteria and Indicators development. (ii) In 2002 - 2003, I facilitated the development of a methodology to analyze the environmental costs, benefits and risks of development projects, in a local given community and this was tested, validated and being use by the local actors alongside other participatory tools for socio-economic assessment. This study was carried out in partnership with Innovative Resources Management, an American NGO. (ii) I am currently working in the Forest Governance Program of CIFOR, on decentralization and capacity building, at the Central Africa regional office, Yaounde, Cameroon.
Email: a.tiani@cgiar.org

Lini Wollenberg: My interests are people in forests and finding ways to better support them--whether it is land tenure, rights, income, soil and forest conservation, sharing information, organizing or advocacy. Most of my experience is in Asia. I did my MS and PhD research in the mountains of Negros Oriental, the Philippines in the mid- and late-1980s, looking at agroforestry, shifting cultivation and soil conservation practices. My degree at UC Berkeley was in human ecology, but the fieldwork for my graduate studies was my last opportunity to do any kind of ecological work! From 1991-93 I worked in the Asia Program of the Ford Foundation, and in 1994, I joined CIFOR in Bogor, Indonesia. I left CIFOR last year to move to Vermont (USA), although I continue to work for CIFOR as a senior associate (aka consultant!). I currently work on a decentralization and poverty alleviation research project to assist communities and local governments to better define, measure and understand the causes of poverty according to local terms and conditions. My other major research projects have included: the impacts of devolution policies in Asia, scenario methods as a tool for adaptive management, social learning in community-based forest management, approaches for enhancing forest-based incomes, documentation of Dayak livelihoods and dependence on the forest, the effect of incentives from forest incomes on community conservation behavior and the testing of sustainability criteria. Most of my own fieldwork has been in Indonesian Borneo.

In December I will be starting a new position at the University of Vermont, as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture (which includes forest!), which intends to expand their research and international work.

Email: Lini.wollenberg@uvm.edu