Dr Sian Sullivan

Lecturer in Environment & Development
Director BSc Environmental Management

Birkbeck College
London WC1E 7HX

telephone: 020 7631 6474

email: s.sullivan@bbk.ac.uk

Research

My research focuses on exploring and theorising relationships between human and non-human worlds, considering ways in which culture shapes assumptions regarding these relationships and through this also shapes non-human worlds. Currently I am considering these issues through engaging with some implications of current global environmental policy processes which are establishing Payments for Ecosystem Services as the best route for fostering both environmental health and economic growth. I have recently published a paper in the online journal Radical Anthropology which outlines some views regarding these initiatives, and I am working on a book manuscript entitled An ecosystem at your service? Culture, nature and service provision in global environmental policy.

This work extends a key strand of my academic work which engages with manifestations of biodiversity conservation policy and practice under the political economic conditions of capitalism and neoliberalism. Modern biodiversity conservation can be fraught with tensions that arise between the desire to set aside land for conservation purposes and the displacements of local people and lifeworlds that may occur in this process. I work with a network of social scientists, conservation and development practitioners and community activists who are highlighting these tensions as they are manifesting in a range of localities globally. Some of this work is supported by the London-based International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) which, together with the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, recently funded a workshop that I co-organised on these issues, which took place in Washington (May 2008). The initial report from this workshop, entitled Problematizing neoliberal biodiversity conservation: displaced and disobedient knowledge, can be found online here: http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/G02526.pdf.

My work on modern biodiversity conservation and its relationships with local lands, livelihoods and lifeworlds is grounded in long-term fieldwork in north-west Namibia. Here I have worked with Khoesān people called Damara or ≠Nū Khoen, documenting knowledge and practice regarding plants and animals, and researching people/landscape relationships in changing policy contexts (from apartheid, to post-independence Namibia and a dominance of neoliberal policy frames). In 2000 I co-edited the book Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power (London, Edward Arnold), which has become a key text in the sub-discipline of 'Political Ecology'.