Rethinking Environmental Governance. Broadening the Scope, Deepening the Perspectives

The Book

Linking socio-economic drivers with the evolution of cultural norms, the (re)shaping of institutional arrangements, and ever-changing power relations, this book looks at processes of institutional emergence across spatio-temporal scales. Through case study illustrations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it illustrates how actors and institutions (co)produced political spaces of engagement as an integral part of their livelihood (re)making.

The Speakers

Diana Suhardiman (Book Editor) is a professor of natural resource governance, climate and equity at Leiden University and director at KITLV. Putting power and politics central in the contemporary struggles of natural resource governance, her most recent research looks at grassroots climate governance in Southeast Asia, where she focuses on the politics of knowledge (re)production processes in various socioecological systems. 

Jonathan Rigg (Book Editor) is a professor of human geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on questions of agrarian, livelihood and environmental change in Southeast and South Asia and he has undertaken fieldwork in Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. 

Melissa Marschke (Book Editor) is a professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her work focuses on labour precarity, social-ecological change, and resource governance with a focus on the seafood sector.

Juliana Forigua Sandoval (Book Contributor) is an environmental philosopher working at the intersection of political ecology, history, and science and technology studies. Her research focuses on archives, rivers, the history, and the anthropology of artefacts. She is currently conducting her PhD research on the Magdalena River (Colombia) within the River Commons project (Wageningen University and Research).

Moderators
Adrian Perkasa (KITLV) and Paul Rabe (IIAS)

Organisation

This book launch event is organised in collaboration between the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).

Registration (required)

Please register via the web form on this page and indicate if you will join online or in person. A lunchbox will be served for (registered) in-person attendees. Registration deadline: Monday, 8 Dec. 2025.