Research & Grant Projects

Limeberry and colleagues celebrate a fresh harvest of camotes with a leading seed saver in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellow: Link to announcement here.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Alder Keleman Saxena at Northern Arizona University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the interlinking issues of nutritional security, hunger reduction, and sustainable agriculture. As the United States experiences increasing environmental changes (e.g., heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and flooding) on local access to nutritional foods is fundamental. Food crops that evolve and adapt are central to securing food access in rapidly changing environments. This project undertakes these interrelated issues, examining the ways in which locally-based community seed banks are protecting crop diversity while increasing local access to nutritional, healthy foods. Community seed banks can serve as central nodes that 1) connect people to food resources, 2) steward the environment, and 3) preserve and grow important regional food crops. Despite their importance in these roles, there is little to no research on how they actually serve impacted communities. This undertaking fills this gap, examining community seed banks in areas of high poverty and hunger, to trace the pathways from seed banks to food access and nutrition. The project will contribute original data on these pathways, illustrating where, how, when, and who benefits from local seed banks.

The research objective of this undertaking is to identify existing agrobiodiversity conservation initiatives in most impacted regions of the US, linking them to how they facilitate community networks for the goal of providing and increasing access to food and nutritional security. This project undertakes a four-part research design, including network analysis and pathway mapping to determine the flow of seeds to and away from community seed banks, identifying the various actors involved, their levels of participation, and outcomes of seed and benefit sharing to the community. Additionally, it will identify a typology of seed-to-food pathways, which could include backyard garden projects, community gardens, community supported- agriculture, free community fridges, educational spaces, school gardens, and others. Community members and community seed bank organizers in each case site area will be interviewed, with all interviews coded and housed in qualitative data coding software. Finally, focus groups will be held in each identified case site to assess perceptions of community seed banks and their pathways, along with how communities themselves identify these pathways. This research will contribute 1) methods for examining the conditions under which CSBs support food security/nutrition through expanding access to agrobiodiversity; 2) multiple data sets, including indexes of locally and regionally conserved seed varieties, ecosystems in which they are used, and how communities use them; and 3) network analyses introducing a typology of actors and institutions that support the flow of agrobiodiversity to and from communities. Broadly, this postdoctoral project directly contributes to global calls for increasing research on the status of agrobiodiversity. Furthermore, it contributes to understanding the intersections of sustainable food systems with food security/access/and nutrition. This research emphasizes the ways in which human societies interact and engage with their physical environments, with potential to shape theories on environmental governance and food policy.

Doctoral Dissertation: Fast Violence, Slow Resistance: Territoriality, Land Rights, and Collective Identity for Agrobiodiversity Governance in the Americas

In the face of climate change, arable land loss, and food system degradation, Indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities are frontline groups leading agrobiodiversity conservation. Their work has often gone unrecognized at national and international policy levels; across the Americas they face increasing threats and violence as they defend their environments and food systems. Despite this, these communities have still implemented significant legal protections and policy solutions for agrobiodiversity and environmental conservation. To this end, my dissertation asks: how do territorially-based communities – including Indigenous peoples, Afro-Descendent peoples, and peasant farmers/land workers – create and adapt formalized legal protections for their communities and environments? Specifically, how do territorial claims embedded in agrobiodiversity practices lead to formalized community-rights protections?

This research engages qualitative mixed methods, including discourse analysis of policies, manifestos, and archival documents; historical process tracing; and semi-structured interviews. My cases are with 1) Parque de la Papa in Andean Peru, 2) Los Riscales Afro-Colombian Community Council in the Tribugá Gulf of Colombia, 3) The Community System for Biodiversity (SICOBI) in Oaxaca, Mexico, and 4) the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (ECBI) in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States.

I find that the Indigenous and Afro-Descendant communities in these specific case sites use strategic partnerships with local NGOs and state institutions to foster narratives that support their legitimate and legal rights to decision-making authority over their local environments. They do this through translating Indigenous and Afro-Descendant cosmovisions and ontologies into legal discourses, primarily through the lens of biocultural rights. This highlights ways in which communities not only contest, but also use and adapt tools and strategies of neoliberalism and neocolonialism to legitimize and advance their rights in legal spaces. I also find that partnerships with specific NGOs create a very real safety buffer between them and states or other extractive actors that seek to dominate their territories. In many ways, the NGO becomes an intermediary, a translator of community demands to regional, national, or even global dialogues. These frameworks not only help ensure legal protections for their own territories and agrobiodiversity, but also shape environmental policy itself.

This research contributes to re-thinking and re-imagining biodiversity governance and food sovereignty in the current era of climatic and food crises, as well as contributing to knowledge on the intersections of identity, indigeneity, conservation, and food systems.

National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center: Diverse Pathways to Nourishment (click for link to project)

Research Assistant, Accountability Research Center, 2017-2019:

"Sandwich Strategy Reforms--ARC is undertaking a comparative study of whether and how sandwich strategy initiatives drive pro-accountability institutional change, in Nigeria and in the Global South more broadly. The sandwich strategy describes an effort to make government more accountable to its citizens that involves collaboration between reformers within government and citizens working to change government from the outside. ARC partners with Center for Democracy and Development in Nigeria in this project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation."

Research Assistant, Co-Author, The Responsive Forest Governance Initiative (RFGI) 2019-2021

PIs: Jesse Ribot, James Murombedzi, Ebrima Sall, Edmund Barrow.

The Responsive Forest Governance Initiative (RFGI) is a research and training program focused on environmental governance in Africa. RFGI is jointly managed by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP) Program of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). RFGI was generously supported by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). RFGI has focused on local representation in climate adaptation and mitigation in the forestry sector in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda, with comparative cases in Nepal and Peru. The initiative trained young, in country policy researchers so as to build an Africa-wide network of environmental governance analysts. The present handbook is a product of phase one of RFGI that conducted field research and analysis from 2011 until 2015. Nations worldwide have introduced democratic decentralization reforms. Such reforms aim to make local government responsive and accountable to the needs and aspirations of citizens so as to improve equity, service delivery and resource management.

The decentralization of natural resource management, particularly of forests, is a significant development, since these provide local governments and local people with needed revenue, wealth, and subsistence. Responsive local governments can provide forest-dependent populations with the flexibility they need to manage, adapt to and remain resilient in their changing environment. RFGI aims to enhance and help institutionalize widespread responsive and accountable government, by which we mean representative, local governance processes that reduce vulnerability, enhance local wellbeing, and improve forest management.

RFGI places special emphasis on developing guidelines to ensure fair and equitable implementation of forest management and use, natural resource management and use, and on such programs as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and other climate-adaptation interventions. Fair and sustainable natural resource management will require permanent local representative institutions that can integrate local needs with national and international objectives. This document uses the results from RFGI reflections and research to outline project and policy guidance to help achieve this goal.