News
Two PhD Positions available for NWO Vidi Project ‘Tragedy of the Tropics’ (Wageningen UR) – deadline 31 March 2025
Pim de Zwart, associate professor and PI of the NWO Vidi-project entitled ‘Tragedy of the Tropics: Colonialism, Commodities and Commons in Southeast Asian Deforestation since 1850’ is looking for 2 fully funded 4-year PhD students, to be employed at the Department of Economic and Environmental History of Wageningen University and Research.
This project aims to gain a better understanding of the structural conditions that have hindered, and continue to hinder, the transition to more sustainable land and forest use and to assess the factors affecting long-run changes in deforestation rates at the local level. Project members will use GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and digitised colonial topographic and vegetation maps to develop new spatial estimates of forest area in Southeast Asia across different benchmark years since c. 1850. The project investigates how developments in global trade, the implementation of colonial and post-colonial policies, changes to local land rights and patterns of socioeconomic and political inequality have impacted deforestation in the long run.
One PhD student will be hired to reconstruct and analyse deforestation since 1850 for Malaysia and the other will do so for the Philippines. Both PhDs will be supervised by Professor Ewout Frankema and Dr Pim de Zwart; the latter will perform the research on the Indonesia part of this project.
Applications should be submitted ultimately 31 March 2025.
