Dr Sam Staddon

Having started my career as an ecologist involved in applied and academic conservation work, I am now placed within a geography department where my research draws largely on the social sciences. My research centres on society-environment interactions generally and more specifically on devolved forms of natural resource management and community-based approaches to conservation. My recent PhD considered the role of ecological monitoring in the environmental decision-making of subsistence forest-users in rural Nepal. My work deals with issues of environmental sustainability, biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation, social equity, knowledges of nature, power and politics. The fields of political ecology, nature-society studies and development studies provide the theoretical bases for my work. I am particularly keen to work interdisciplinarily by grounding myself epistemologically and methodologically in the social sciences but by engaging with and writing for a natural science audience. My research interests relate to both the global North and South and I have worked in the UK, Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.

I am currently working as a Teaching Fellow in Environment and Development at the University of Edinburgh. I shall be running core courses for the Masters in Environment and Development; 'Society and Development' and 'Understanding Environment and Development'. 

I have recently completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh entitled: 'Keeping Track of Nature: Interdisciplinary insights for participatory ecological monitoring' (see tab to the left for more details).