Notes on Contributors
Daniel Callo-Concha
is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research (zef), University of Bonn. He has fifteen years of experience in the interface between agriculture and natural resource management in Latin America and Africa. His academic approach is based on the systems thinking method for handling complexity in social-ecological systems. Callo-Concha’s recent research explores farmers’ adaptation to climate change, food and nutrition security in developing countries, urbanisation in the Global South, and sustainable mining and agriculture. His most significant publications include: Callo-Concha et al., “Lessons for Research, Capacity Development and Policy in Agroforestry for Development,” Agroforestry Systems 91.5 (2017): 795–798. doi:10.1007/s10457-017-0085-6; and Callo-Concha, “West African Farmers’ Climate Change Adaptation: From Technological Change Towards Transforming Institutions,” in Implementing Climate Change Adaptation in Cities and Communities, ed. Leal Filho et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2016), 253–265.
Joy Clancy
a member of the Department of Governance and Technology for Sustainability (cstm), University of Twente, is a professor in Development Studies who specialises in gender and energy. For more than thirty years, Joy’s research has focused on small-scale energy systems for developing countries, including the technology transfer process and the role that energy plays as an input for small businesses and the potential it offers entrepreneurs, particularly women, through the provision of new infrastructure services. Joy is currently the Principal Investigator in a five-year £4.5 million research project by energia, funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID): “Building the Evidence Base for Improving Energy Investments’ Effectiveness by Taking a Gendered Approach” (
Manfred Denich
is Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research (zef), Department of Ecology and Natural Resources Management, University of Bonn, There he conducts research on land use and food security, renewable energy, environmental and climate change, ecosystem services, sustainable use of natural resources, biodiversity, and urbanisation. He is part of the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (wascal) and Project Director of the GlobE—BiomassWeb Project at the University of Bonn. His publications include: Callo-Concha D. et al., “Bridging Science and Development: Lessons Learnt from Two Decades of Development Research,” Agroforestry Systems 91 (2016): 799–810. doi 10.1007/s10457-016-0008-y; and Atela, Joanes O. et al., “Agricultural Land Allocation in Small Farms around Maasai Mau Forest, Kenya, and the Implications on Carbon Stocks,” Journal of Ecology and the Natural Environment (JENE) 4.4 (2012): 98–108.
Sara de Wit
is a Fellow at the Institute of Science Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford and part of the Forecasts for Anticipatory Humanitarian Action (fathum) project. Trained in anthropology and African Studies, de Wit has a strong empirical orientation, with long-term fieldwork experience in southeast Madagascar, the Bamenda Grassfields in Cameroon, and Maasailand in northern Tanzania. She has carried out “ethnographies of aid”—at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, development theories, environmental anthropology, and postcolonial studies—in which she broadly focused on how globally circulating ideas, such as climate change and notions of development, travel, and what happens when they are translated by various actors along the translation chain.
Ton Dietz
is Emeritus Professor of African Development at Leiden University and former director of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, where he currently works as a Senior Researcher. His most recent publications include: Dietz, Ton, Africa: Still a Silver Lining (Leiden: Leiden University, 2017),
Irit Eguavoen
is a social anthropologist who works at the Center for Development Research (zef), University of Bonn. She was part of the wascal staff from 2011 to 2017 and has coordinated the research group “Politics of Adaptation.” The focus of Irit’s work is on environmental themes in West Africa and Ethiopia. Her empirical research has turned towards questions of sustainable urbanisation and urban citizenship in the “Waterfront Metropolis Abidjan,” an individual research project running from 2017 to 2019. Her most recent publications include: Lauer, Hannes, and Irit Eguavoen, “Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation into Development in The Gambia: A Window of Opportunity for Transformative Processes?” in Innovation in Climate Change Adaptation, ed. Walter Leal Filho (Berlin: Springer, 2016), 87–98; and Tan, Jiaxin, and Irit Eguavoen, “Digital Environmental Governance in China: Information Disclosure, Pollution Control, and Environmental Activism in the Yellow River Delta,” Water Alternatives, 10.3 (2017): 910–929.
Ben Fanstone
graduated from the University of Stirling’s Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy with a PhD in 2017. His thesis entitled “The Pursuit of the ‘Good Forest’ in Kenya, c.1890–1963: The History of the Contested Development of State Forestry within a Colonial Settler State” examines the often discordant relationships that state forestry officials had with other colonial actors, especially the European settler population, as well as exploring the diverse forestry personnel and their evolving scientific ideals. A particular emphasis is the development of an agroforestry labour system within the colony and its relationship to protest, food security, and the Mau Mau uprising. His other research interests include colonial forestry in Nigeria, environmental conflict, indigenous adaptation to colonial land use regimes as well as colonial and postcolonial policies and their impact on land use today.
Ingo Haltermann
is a graduate geographer who also works as a freelance editor. From 2009 to 2016 he was Junior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (kwi) in Essen, Germany, where he was part of the Research Unit “Climate and Culture,” and Research Assistant at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg. After gaining his Diploma in Geography from the University of Münster in 2007, he studied Peace and Conflict Studies at the FernUniversität in Hagen. His particular research interest lies in the perception of and response to climate change at an individual and household level, but he also addresses corresponding cultural and political processes. Among other publications, he has written on “The Perception of Natural Hazards in the Context of Human (In-)Security,” in Negotiating Disasters: Politics, Representation, Meanings, ed. Ute Luig (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2012), 59–78; and on “The Attachment to Place in the Aftermath of Disasters,” (original title: “Woven Together: Perspectives from Four Continents.”) in Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, ed. Mark Cave, and Stephen M. Sloan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Laura Jeffery
is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, where she held an esrc Research Fellowship (RES-063-27-0214) with a particular focus on debates about environmental knowledge in the context of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Her relevant recent publications include articles on ecological restoration and human-environment relations: “Ecological Restoration in a Cultural Landscape: Conservationist and Chagossian Approaches to Controlling the ‘Coconut Chaos’ on the Chagos Archipelago,” Human Ecology 42.6 (2014): 999–1006; and “‘We are the True Guardians of the Environment’: Human-Environment Relations and Debates about the Future of the Chagos Archipelago,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19.2 (2013): 300–318.
Emmanuel Kreike
is Professor of African and Environmental History at Princeton University. He studied African History at Yale University (PhD, 1996) and Tropical Forestry at Wageningen University (Dr.Sc., 2006). His current research focuses on the impact of war and population flight on rural societies and environments in Southern Africa as well as in global and comparative perspective. Kreike’s most recent books include: Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia: The Global Consequences of Local Contradictions (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010); and Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Vimbai Kwashirai
is a Zimbabwean, Oxonian and independent scholar. He is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe and is also associated with the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex. His research interests are in economic and environmental issues, specifically in modern Zimbabwe and Africa more generally. The author of Green Colonialism in Zimbabwe, 1890–1980 (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009), Vimbai has published extensively on these themes as well as on social and political developments in Zimbabwe, as reflected in his forthcoming monograph Election Violence in Zimbabwe: Human Rights, Politics and Power 1980–2018 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). He has taught at several universities in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom, including Durham and Liverpool. Vimbai has received many academic awards and fellowships in the UK and Germany. He is a leading expert on Zimbabwean human rights, land rights, poverty, and ecological transformations. His current research is concerned with the sustainability of drought coping strategies in Southern Africa, in which he seeks to find lasting solutions to climate change drought-induced socio-economic problems.
James C. McCann
is Chair of the Department of History and Professor at Boston University. He won the 2014 Distinguished Scholar Prize from the American Society of Environmental History. In 2012/2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a study of the ecology of malaria in a region of unstable transmission: The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirits (Athens, OH, 2014). He has been a scholar in residence at Harvard, Yale, the National Humanities Center, Addis Ababa University, Hiob Ludolf Centre, University of Hamburg, the National University of Lesotho, and the University of Khartoum and has served as a consultant to many ngos and international organisations. He is the author of six books, including Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa (Munich: Heinemann, 1999) and Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Bertrand F. Nero
is a Ghanaian postdoctoral fellow in the bmbf-funded research project GlobE—BiomassWeb at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics at the University of Bonn. He is a former junior researcher at the university’s Center for Development Research (zef), Department of Ecology and Natural Resources Management, and works for the Ghanaian Ministry of Petroleum in Accra. One of his recent publications is: “Urban Green Space Dynamics and Socio-Environmental Inequity: Multi-Resolution and Spatiotemporal Data Analysis of Kumasi, Ghana,” International Journal of Remote Sensing 38.23 (2017): 6993–7020.
Jonas Østergaard Nielsen
is Professor in Integrative Geography at Humboldt-University’s Department of Geography and at IRI THESys, where he leads a research group. Together with his team he is investigating the emerging framework of telecoupling in land use science, considering how distal environmental, social, political, and economic drivers of change influence local land use decisions. Jonas’ research is also concerned with human dimensions of global climate change and how climate change opens up for explorations around global–local interactions in an increasing connected world. Since 2007, Jonas has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso. His publications include: Friis, Cecilie, and Jonas Ø. Nielsen, “Land Use Change in a Telecoupled World: The Relevance and Applicability of the Telecoupling Framework in the Case of Banana Plantation Expansion in Laos,” Ecology and Society 22.4 (2017): 30. DOI:
Erick Tambo
is a lecturer at the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (wascal) at the University of The Gambia. He graduated in Computer Science from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany, and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the FernUniversität in Hagen. He is an Associate Academic Officer at unu-ehs, where he is in charge of the conceptualisation, organisation, and management of e-learning activities. Tambo leads and coordinates unu-ehs contributions towards the implementation of the Higher Education Cooperation with the African Union’s Pan African University Institute for Water and Energy including Climate Change. His publications include: Tambo, Erick R.G. et al., Management of Environmental Risks and Natural Disasters: How Can eLearning Help? (Bonn, 2012).
Julia Tischler
is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Basel, where she focuses on Southern Africa, development, and labour, environmental, and global history. After completing her doctorate at Cologne University, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University and at the International Research Centre “Work and Human Lifecycle” (re:work) in Berlin. Her first monograph, Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), examined the Kariba Dam on the border between today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe as a case study of late colonial nation-building. Her interest in environmental history is further reflected in the volume Grounding Global Climate Change: Contributions from the Social and Cultural Sciences (Berlin: Springer; 2015, co-edited with Heike Greschke) as well as her ongoing second book project on agricultural development in South Africa (c.1900–1950).