We welcome our first fellow Joel at University of Copenhagen

We are very happy to welcome our first COUPLED fellow, Joel!

Joel Persson (ESR 15), supervised  by Ole Mertz, will be working on the research project 15, International forest conservation discourses and local decisions as telecoupled systems, based at the University of Copenhagen.

Joel completed his Master’s programme in International Development and Management at Lund University, Sweden, in 2016, during which he gained some experience interning with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN in Cambodia supporting the national REDD+ programme. After writing his master’s thesis on community forests in Cambodia, he spent a year at the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK supporting the commissioning of research projects in international development.

His motivation stems from experiences in Cambodia, which exposed him to the conflicting interests in the natural resource sector, the complicated role of international conservation discourses, and how these manifest in local decisions on land-use and livelihoods. Lacking the necessary tools, however, he believes that his understanding would remain incomplete.

His research project will thus help generate important insights on the complex and distal linkages between conservation discourses and the local decisions on which many global conservation efforts depend. In order to make sense of these complex interactions and analyse related flows of information, the project will take an interdisciplinary approach and employ both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Again, a warm welcome to you, Joel! We are looking forward to a successful cooperation in the upcoming years.

You can find more information about Joel’s research project here.