Dr Rebecca Elmhirst - social justice in a changing environment

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst’s interest in the ways communities respond to negative and socially uneven impacts of environmental change began when she was introduced to feminist geography as a Masters Student at the University of British Columbia in Canada. For her PhD, she spent a year doing ethnographic fieldwork and living with a family of resettled ‘forest squatters’ in what was at that time an inaccessible and very poor part of Lampung, Indonesia.

Learning from the women and men of this poor and marginalised community launched two decades of research and teaching experience on struggles over environmental governance, migration and social justice in the global South. Most of her work is in partnership with scholar-activists in Southeast Asia, with whom she has developed various programmes of research and teaching. These include current projects on the links between migrant remittances, livelihoods and forest governance in Indonesia, and on living with floods in peri-urban contexts in Southeast Asia.

Dr Rebecca Elmhirst

The work that Rebecca and her research partners are undertaking has helped develop and advance ‘feminist political ecology’, an approach to research and practice that empowers and promotes social and ecological transformation for women and other marginalised groups. This has taken shape in a number of different projects: findings from a recent study of the impacts of large scale investments in oil palm on indigenous women in Indonesia have been used by lobby groups to introduce better social justice mechanisms in the oil palm commodity chain. She is currently co-producing a book with women and men working in technical organisations on the challenges of integrating transformative feminist political ecology into mainstream environment and development work.

Her research collaborations frequently take her back to Indonesia and Thailand, and these visits provide a very special opportunity to think through current academic and policy debates with communities at the most challenging forefront of global environmental change.

Oil palm workers (Photo by Icaro Cooke Vieira, CIFOR)

Inspiring others

Rebecca is currently a co-researcher on a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie International Training Network of European universities, which seeks to use feminist political ecology to address urgent environmental issues at the European and global level. The network also provides a unique opportunity for a new generation of emerging scholars in Europe to network and learn with colleagues in the Global South.