Featured Student: Chad Dear, Ph.D. Candidate
Research Site: Banhine National Park, Mozambique
 Some of the world’s most biologically diverse places are also home to some of the world’s poorest, most marginalized, and most directly natural resource dependent peoples. This type of overlapping ecological and social significance often occurs in places now designated as protected areas and has sparked contentious debates about historic, present, and future relationships between biodiversity, human resource use, protected area management, and poverty. Central to these debates are decisions about whether protected area residents should be displaced from protected areas and resettled elsewhere.
For my dissertation, I investigated decision-making processes behind the displacement of residents of Banhine National Park in Mozambique. I also investigated the implications of displacement and resettlement for affected people. Among the many types of people I interviewed and observed for this research were: displaced park residents, park managers, representatives of conservation and development NGOs, Mozambican government officials from the lowest to the highest levels and in various ministries, and staff from the World Bank in Mozambique and in Washington, D.C.
I was supported in this research by the faculty on my dissertation committee, by a team of fellow graduate students, other academics, protected area managers, and NGO representatives in the US and in Southern Africa. I made nearly all of these professional connections through networks established by faculty and administrators in the College of Forestry and Conservation.
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