Digital innovation and environmental governance. Political economy and political ecology.
Research
Environmental governance and digital innovation is the major focus of my current research. While at Stanford on sabbatical in 2015/2016, I began my work on tech innovation and environmental governance, focusing on the evolution of conservation in response to environmental sensing and emerging technologies.
Committed to interdisciplinarity, I collaborate with engineers, and with natural, social and medical scientists on a range of research projects. My starting point for many of these projects is the insight that environmental processes and social practices (broadly defined, including economic, social and cultural dimensions) are mutually constituted.
I conduct research all over the world; most of my fieldwork has taken place in North America, Latin America, Europe, and south-east Asia (over a dozen countries to date).
Current research interests include: water infrastructure governance; water security (particularly landscape dimensions); rescaling environmental (and particularly water) governance; the securitization of the environment (particularly at the water-energy-food security nexus); watershed health (and eco-health more generally); emergent forms of environmental governance, particularly in Latin America; sustainability and ecopolitics; Indigenous water governance.
I have a strong commitment to policy, and regularly make contributions to policy debates.
Prospective students are very welcome to get in touch. I currently supervise students in UBC’s Department of Geography as well as the graduate interdisciplinary environmental studies program at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.