Position: PhD Fellow

Academic Interests:

My academic and research interests encompass a broad range of topics in land and forest management, socio-ecological and climate change, social movement activism, alternatives to development, and development-environment nexus. My PhD topic critically interrogates the global-local dynamics of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as modern, neoliberal forest conservation project in an indigenous peoples’ territory in Mindanao, located in southern Philippines, focusing on policy translation processes, people’s agency, and development brokerage. I am particularly interested in how multiple and different social groups—divided along age, class, gender, ethnicity, & geography— as well as state and non-state actors define, articulate, negotiate, and contest their interests, demands, and claims about climate change, sustainability, self-determination, and natural resources management. My research is animated by the questions, why do local actors do what they do, or more specifically, why indigenous peoples seemingly embrace modern, neoliberal forest conservation

Keywords: green neoliberalism, people’s agency, PES, policy translation, development brokerage, indigenous peoples.

Contact:

MaryAnn.Manahan@ugent.be

Website: Researchgate; Academia.edu

Teaching

• Politics of Development: Seminars (Which/Whose Development: NGOs and the Challenges of Alternatives)
• Politics of Conflict: Seminars (Global rise of the far right and violence) 

Current Research Projects:

• Igmale’eng’en (Sacred Forests): participatory mapping of the Talaandig people’s ecological knowledge in relation to PES adoption
• Violence Against Women in the Time of Tokhang: A Feminist Action Research on the Killing Fields of Bulacan Province 

Publications: