Dear colleagues,

I am looking for 2 fully funded 4-year PhD students for a project entitled “Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commodities and Commons in Southeast Asian Deforestation since 1850”. This project aims to gain a better understanding of the structural conditions that have hindered, and continue to hinder, the transition to more sustainable land and forest use and to assess the factors affecting long-run changes in deforestation rates at the local level. Project members will use GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and digitized colonial topographic and vegetation maps to develop new spatial estimates of forest area in Southeast Asia across different benchmark years since ca. 1850. The project investigates how developments in global trade, the implementation of colonial and post-colonial policies, changes to local land rights and patterns of socio-economic and political inequality have impacted deforestation in the long run.

One PhD student will be hired to reconstruct and analyse deforestation since 1850 for Malaysia and the other for the Philippines. A third project, executed by myself and international collaborators, deals with Indonesia. The projected is executed with the Economic and Environmental History Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Please find the link to the PhD vacancy on Malaysia here: https://lnkd.in/eY9PKFQM

 Please find the link to the PhD vacancy on the Philippines here: https://lnkd.in/ecYPq-dR

The application closes March 31st.

 Want to know more, email me at pim.dezwart@wur.nl