Adrienne Johnson
| Adrienne Johnson, PhD student, Clark University, USA. Broadly, my research examines the intersections of the political ecology of resource development and the geographies of ‘meeting culture’ in shaping environmental governance outcomes. Over the course of my graduate studies, I have explored these interests in the context of the global palm oil industry by looking at corporate social responsibility and multi-stakeholder engagement approaches to governing palm oil production in Indonesia and most recently in Ecuador. Email: AdJohnson@Clarku.edu |
Research on Land-grabbing:
Green Governance of Green Grabs? Roundtable on Sustainable Pal Oil (RSPO) in Ecuador
My project entitled, Green governance or green grab?, seeks to analyze the politics and power relations of ‘alternative’ multi-stakeholder institutions involved in governing resources and land. I examine a new collaborative governance arrangement known as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Ecuador and how, instead of ameliorating deep inequalities in the palm oil industry, this understudied field can be a new site of institutionalizing environmental policies that sanction cases of land dispossession and facilitate incentives for new forms of land enclosures. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to analyze the extent to which this ‘power-sharing’ institution is a mechanism for circulating ‘green’ capitalist perspectives that ultimately encourage and legitimize the material practice of land acquisitions. To further this research, I will travel to Ecuador to attend the 3rd Latin American RSPO conference and to study the national interpretation of RSPO principles and new ‘green’ policies relating to palm oil governance and land tenure.
