Dr. Janet Fisher

Research interests:

I am an environmental social scientist interested in the links between environmental change, environmental management and human development. I have two strands of research. In the first, I use ecosystem services concepts (that focus on the various benefits humans derive from nature) to do interdisciplinary work with natural and social scientists, to understand how the environment supports human wellbeing. In the second research strand, I am interested in understanding how the increasing use of ecosystem services concepts and associated policies, which are often market-based, are changing conservation practice.

One of my core interests is in developing understanding of the links between ecosystem services and human wellbeing and poverty. My postdoctoral work at Edinburgh University was within a multidisciplinary team focused on developing new conceptual approaches to the nexus between services and wellbeing. A number of aspects of this conceptual work are being investigated more empirically through our project, ACES, which examines the rural development implications of various forms of land use change in Mozambique.

Another strand of my research focuses upon the uptake and implications of ecosystem services concepts in conservation practice in the global south. Through a collaborative project with a number of scholars of environmental justice at the University of East Anglia, we are examining how conservation practitioners justify and promote pro-poor governance of ecosystem services. In parallel, we are examining how different schools of thought in political philosophy and environmental ethics also provide justification for pro-poor environmental governance. Through this, we aim to bring more discussion of philosophy and ethics into considerations of ecosystem services and human wellbeing.