Tim Forsyth

• PhD
• Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science

In a recent article in this journal, Ståle Knudsen argues that the recent trend to flat ontology in political ecology is mistaken and urges more engagement with critical realism as introduced by Roy Bhaskar. His article also criticizes how various political ecologists have used critical realism. In this response, I argue that Knudsen misses the poi...

Equitable resilience is an increasing focus of development policy, but there is still insufficient attention to how the framings of equity itself shape what, and who, is targeted through development efforts. Universalistic assumptions about climate risk or social marginalization can define equity in ways that hide dynamic and intersectional influen...

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inap...

Agricultural commercialization and livelihood diversification have been proposed as ways to bring economic prosperity to rural zones after long-term violent conflict. Critics, however, argue that these market-based interventions exacerbate, rather than resolve, older social divisions, and that commercialization needs to be seen as part of agrarian...

The trend of moving away from global environmental assessments and toward solution-oriented assessments raises new challenges because of the need to engage directly with politics, values, and deliberation. Here, we argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosy...

Landscape Approaches have been proposed as a transferable model of multi-stakeholder governance, yet assume conditions of ideal speech, trust, and transparency that seem untransferable to authoritarian regimes. This paper argues that building Landscape Approaches under authoritarian conditions cannot be based on a governance deficit model of awaiti...

Decades of research and policy interventions on biodiversity have insufficiently addressed the dual issues of biodiversity degradation and social justice. New approaches are therefore needed. We devised a research and action agenda that calls for a collective task of revisiting biodiversity toward the goal of sustaining diverse and just futures for...

This paper calls for a more critical analysis of implicit social values in time-based projections of transformative change in climate change policy in developing countries. The paper argues that transformative change is a form of socio-technical imaginary, in which contemporary visions of social order influence supposedly technical, and apolitical...

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has been mandated to assess transformative change in order to identify pathways for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity. Yet, the topic of transformative change raises significant new challenges for biodiversity assessments because it combines scient...

Life on Earth is facing severe challenges. Human action is leading to a deterioration in natural resources and ecosystems, and widespread declines in populations of wild species. This presents an existential threat to humanity by undermining the capacity of biodiversity to support human well-being. The Biodiversity Revisited research and action age...

What has gone wrong with nature conservation and how do we bring about transformative change to create a more sustainable future? Which types of knowledge, ethics, principles and actions are needed to reverse the decline of biodiversity? And given the urgency to act, how can we harness them to sustain a just and diverse future for life on Earth? T...

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualiz...

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those...

Popular environmentalism can have limited democratic outcomes if it reproduces structures of social order. This article seeks to advance understandings of environmental democratization by examining the analytical framework of civic epistemologies as a complement to the current use of environmental narratives in political ecology and science and tec...

Approaches to resilience to climate change can be socially exclusionary if they do not acknowledge diverse experiences of risks or socio-economic barriers to resilience. This paper contributes to analyses of resilience by studying how theories of change (ToC) processes used by development organizations might lead to social exclusions, and seeking w...

This book is a compilation of policy analyses on shifting cultivation throughout South and Southeast Asia. It is hoped that the availability of these analyses of past and present policies will help governments to formulate better informed policies towards shifting cultivation, that will ultimately contribute to both poverty reduction amongst upland...

Malthusian analysts predict that unchecked population growth will lead to the degradation and exhaustion of natural resources, and possible social collapse. In contrast, other theorists have argued that resource scarcity will correct itself through the operation of market forces or human ingenuity. Still other analysts have argued that access to re...

Much discussion about environmental policy claims that environmental research needs to be separated from political influences in order to maintain trust and rigor within research. Various social scientists, however, have proposed that social norms always influence the generation of facts about environmental problems, and that, consequently, there i...

Brown, Katrina. 2016:Resilience, Development and Global Change. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. xiv + 228 pp. £80 (hardback), £26.09 (paperback). ISBN: 978–0-415–66346–5 (hardback). ISBN: 978–0-415–66347–2 (paperback). ISBN: 978–0-203–49809–5 (e-book).

Community-based adaptation to climate change (CBA) is an approach to adaptation that aims to include vulnerable people in the design and implementation of adaptation measures. The most obvious forms of CBA include simple, but accessible, technologies such as storage of freshwater during flooding, or raising the level of houses near the sea. It can...

This article reviews and contrasts two approaches that water security researchers employ to advance understanding of the complexity of water-society policy challenges. A prevailing reductionist approach seeks to represent uncertainty through calculable risk, links national GDP tightly to hydro-climatological causes, and underplays diversity and pol...

Much previous research on climate governance and vulnerability has focused on reducing the risks posed by physical climatic events such as storms and floods. Increasingly, debates about governance now emphasize the diverse experiences of climate risk, and how definitions of ‘vulnerability’ also reflect assumptions about ‘impacts,’ ‘risks,’ ‘resilie...

No abstract is available for this article.

Reid, Hannah. 2014: Climate Change and Human Development. London: Zed Books. x + 287 pp. ISBN 918-2-78032-441-8 (hardback), 978-1-78032-440-1 (paperback). £80 (hardback), £21.99 (paperback).

Many discussions about political ecology adopt fixed assumptions about either politics or ecology. When this happens, political discussions are often based on a predefined idea of ecological science; and scientific facts are often shaped by political values. This chapter, however, argues that political ecology can only be effective if it aims to an...

This article contributes to comparative environmental politics by integrating comparative analysis with debates about ontological politics as well as science and technology studies. Comparative environmental analysis makes two tacit assumptions: that the subject of comparison (e.g., an environmental policy framework) is mobile and can be detached f...

This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facil...

Tanner, Thomas and Horn-Phathanothai, Leo. 2014: Climate Change and Development. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. xxiii + 367 pp. £85 hardback, £23.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-415-664264 (hardback), 978-0-415-66427 (paperback).

Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services-based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect en...

Since the emergence of anthropocentric climate change as a theme of public policy some 25 years ago, much academic debate has taken place within the discipline of International Relations, and especially the study of how competing nation states can overcome national interests in order to sign international agreements to limit greenhouse gases. Incre...

This paper provides a counterpoint to recent discussions of 'eco-governmentality' or 'environmentality,' which analyse how states use knowledge to regulate citizens and make problems governable. Adopting the concept of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper argues that well-known approaches to environmentality fail to a...

Carrapatoso, Astrid and Kürzinger, Edith, editors. 2014: Climate-resilient Develop-ment: Participatory Solutions from Developing Countries. London and New York: Earthscan–Routledge. xx + 299 pp. £95 hardback. £80 e-book. ISBN: 978 0415 82078 3 hardback. ISBN: 978 0203 38598 2 e-book.

Elinor Ostrom had a profound impact on development studies through her work on public choice, institutionalism and the commons. In 2009, she became the first — and so far, only — woman to win a Nobel Prize for Economics (a prize shared with Oliver Williamson). Moreover, she won this award as a political scientist, which caused controversy among som...

Discussions about climate change and justice frequently employ dichotomies of procedural and distributive justice, and inter- and intra-generational justice. These distinctions, however, often fail to acknowledge the diverse experience of climate risks, or the contested nature of many proposed solutions. This paper argues for a reassessment of deba...

As climate change adaptation rises up the international policy agenda, matched by increasing funds and frameworks for action, there are mounting questions over how to ensure the needs of vulnerable people on the ground are met. Community-based adaptation (CBA) is one growing proposal that argues for tailored support at the local level to enable vul...

Hampton, Mark P. 2013: Backpacker Tourism and Economic Development: Perspectives from the Less Developed World. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 59418 9 (hardback); 978 0 203 54730 4 (e-book). £72.85 (hardback), £64 (ebook).

McKinnon, Katharine. 2011: Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hope, Politics and Practice. Singapore and Copenhagen: National University of Singapore Press and Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. x + 235 pp. $34 paperback. ISBN: 978 9971 69 522 4.

Community‐based adaptation ( CBA ) is a form of adaptation that aims to reduce the risks of climate change to the world's poorest people by involving them in the practices and planning of adaptation. It adds to current approaches to adaptation by emphasizing the social, political, and economic drivers of vulnerability, and by highlighting the needs...

Walker, Andrew. 2012: Thailand’s political peasants: Power in the modern rural economy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. xiii + 276 pp. ISBN 978 0 299 28824 2 paperback, $29.95. ISBN 978 0 299 28823 5 e-book, $21.95.

Norms of justice are often invoked to justify the globalisation of forest policies but are rarely critically analysed. This paper reviews elements of justice in the values, knowledge, access and property rights relating to forests, especially in developing countries. Rather than defining justice in general terms of distribution of benefits and reco...

Book review of: Alex Loftus, "Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology." (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) ISBN: 9780816665723

The concept of autonomous adaptation is widely used to describe spontaneous acts of reducing risks posed by resource scarcity and, increasingly, climate change. Critics, however, have claimed it is unproven, or simplifies the agency by which smallholders respond to risk. This paper presents empirical research in eight Karen villages in Thailand to...

Book review of: Oliver Pye and Jayati Bhattacharya (eds), "The Palm Oil Controversy in Southeast Asia: A Transnational Perspective." (Singapore: ISEAS, 2013) ISBN 9789814311441.

Low carbon technology transfer to developing countries has been both a lynchpin of, and a key stumbling block to a global deal on climate change. This book brings together for the first time in one place the work of some of the world's leading contemporary researchers in this field. It provides a practical, empirically grounded guide for policy mak...

Southeast Asia. Beyond the sacred forest: Complicating conservation in Southeast Asia. Edited by DoveM., SajiseP. and DoolittleA.. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 372. Bibliography, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 2 - Tim Forsyth

This paper argues that the resistance to climate science from so-called deniers cannot be explained by drawing an imaginary line between two fields of science and politics and then investigating each for malfunctions. Instead, there is a need to understand the co-evolution of scientific knowledge and political norms more holistically, and to identi...

The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some 70 million people, representing an astonishing array of ethnic diversity. How are these peoples fashioning livelihoods now that their homeland is open to economic investment and political change? Moving Mountains presents the work of anthropologists, geographers, and...

The mountainous borderlands of socialist China, Vietnam, and Laos are home to some seventy million minority people of diverse ethnicities. In Moving Mountains, anthropologists, geographers, and political economists with first-hand experience in the region explore these peoples’ survival strategies, as they respond to unprecedented economic and poli...

The public demonstrations by Thailand's Red Shirts in early 2010 have been explained as a labour-based movement resisting Bangkok's entrenched elite, or as a mob mobilized by the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in order to destabilize the current government. This profile looks into the protests' origins and nature. It argues that there ar...

Cross-sector partnerships between representatives of state, private business, and civil society are widely proposed as means to involve non-state actors in public policy. Yet, critics have argued partnerships contain paradoxes that prevent effective regulation or social inclusion. This paper reviews these debates and applies them to climate change...

Deforestation and forest degradation are some of the main contributors to anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, policies to arrest deforestation or increase forest areas are proposed as important forms of climate change policy. This paper summarizes current proposals for addressing the contribution of forests to climate change, and the politic...

A newly forming approach to adaptation addresses a community's development needs as a way to increase the resilience of poor, vulnerable people to the impacts of climate change. Early examples of such community-based adaptation in Bangladesh highlight the successes and limitations of this approach.

Governance is the act or manner of governing. Multilevel, multiactor, participatory governance allows stakeholders to negotiate, formulate and implement policy. • Multilevel, multiactor governance of REDD+ schemes will be needed to overcome differences between government ministries, and to build the trust of investors and local citizens. • Creating...

Piers Blaikie’s writings on political ecology in the 1980s represented a turning point in the generation of environmental knowledge for social justice. His writings since the 1980s demonstrated a further transition in the identification of social justice by replacing a Marxist and eco-catastrophist epistemology with approaches influenced by critica...

In this far-reaching examination of environmental problems and politics in northern Thailand, Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker analyze deforestation, water supply, soil erosion, use of agrochemicals, and biodiversity in order to challenge popularly held notions of environmental crisis. They argue that such crises have been used to support political ob...

Environmental social movements in developing countries are often portrayed as democratizing but may contain important social divisions. This paper presents a new methodology to analyze the social composition and underlying political messages of movements. Nearly 5 000 newspaper reports during 1968–2000 in Thailand are analyzed to indicate the parti...