VIDI Grant awarded to Pim de Zwart

Dr Pim de Zwart, Posthumus fellow and research director of our research network ‘Globalisation, Inequality and Sustainability in Long-Run Perspective’,  received a Vidi Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his project entitled: ‘Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commodities, and Commons in Southeast Asian Deforestation since 1850’.

Halting tropical deforestation is central to combat both global warming and biodiversity decline. Yet despite numerous international agreements ‘to stop and halt deforestation’ since the early 2000s, forest losses across the tropics continued to rise. This Vidi project explores which structural factors inhibit the transition to more sustainable land and forest use and how these have emerged historically. More specifically, it investigates how trade and colonialism affected deforestation rates in insular Southeast Asia and in what ways these relationships were shaped by local land rights and sociopolitical inequalities since 1850. To do so, it pioneers a new approach to assess long-run changes in historical forest area using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and combining colonial-era vegetation and topographic maps with statistical and qualitative sources to construct a detailed picture of the spatial transformation of insular Southeast Asia. Drawing on political ecology, trade and institutional theories for its analytical framework, and collecting socioeconomic, demographic and institutional evidence, the project explains the observed patterns of land-use change.

The N.W. Posthumus Institute congratulates Pim with this grant!