The Coalition Guide

Mr. Alain Diouf is currently a consultant leading the project for a faster implementation of the land reform for the Emerging Senegal Plan “Plan Senegal Emergent.” Recently, he was a senior consultant for the land reform process in Senegal. He has worked for decades on sustainable development, tenure and land reform issues, and in the fields of agroindustry and management of water resources. More specifically, he has worked on land tenure issues for the Senegalese government, the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Senegal, the US company ARD Inc., USAID, and for various private law firms. Additionally, he provided advice on land rights and tenure issues in Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Mozambique. Diouf was also an invited professor at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop, the International University HECI, and the University Bourguiba (all located in Dakar, Senegal), as well as at the International Catholic University for West Africa in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Diouf received his BA and MA from the University of Cheikh Anta Diop (in 1990 and 1992, respectively) and his diploma of third cycle (PhD) from the same university in 1995. He has been an RRI Fellow since 2016.

Don Roberts has over 30 years’ experience as a financial services executive, investment banker and equity professional, and over 35 years of experience in the resource sector, including advising CEOs and Ministers in Canada and internationally, on financing and strategic growth in the resource sectors. He is recognized as a global thought leader in both the Forest Industry and emerging Renewable Energy Sectors. Don is the President & CEO of Nawitka Capital Advisors Ltd. Prior to starting Nawitka in 2013, Don was a Vice-Chair of Wholesale Banking, and Managing Director in Investment Banking with CIBC World Markets Inc. In this position, he founded and led the Bank’s cross-functional Renewable Energy & Clean Technology Team. He also provided senior coverage for companies in the global forest products industry. Don has a B.Sc. Agricultural Economics (Honors), University of British Columbia; M.Sc. Forestry Economics, University of California at Berkeley; MBA (Honors) and Doctoral Studies, International Finance & Economics, University of Chicago, and ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors, Rotman School of Management. Don is also an Adjunct Professor in Forest Management at the University of British Columbia, Visiting Scholar of Clean Energy in the China Center for Energy & Development at Peking University, Mentor with the Pierre Trudeau Foundation, and sits on several profit and non-profit Boards of Directors/Advisors.

Dr. Doris Capistrano is Senior Advisor of the ASEAN-Swiss Partnership on Social Forestry and Climate Change (ASFCC) and a Senior Fellow of the Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA). She was Director of Forests and Governance at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and a Visiting Professor in Forest and Conservation Policy of Wageningen University. She served as Ford Foundation Deputy Representative for India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and was Program Officer for Rural Poverty, Resources and Environment in Bangladesh. She was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Tropical Conservation and Development at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies, and was Instructor in Economics at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos. She has a PhD in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida, USA. Dr. Capistrano has been involved in a number of international initiatives. She was Co-Chair of the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) Working Group on Sub-Global Assessments and member of the MA Technical Panel. She has served on international advisory bodies and committees, including the Science Committee of DIVERSITAS and the Steering Committee of the FAO National Forest Programme Facility. She was Chair of the Founding Board of Directors of the Rights and Resources Initiative, was a Council member of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of the Commons. She served as member of the Advisory Committee of the 2015 World Forestry Congress and is a member of the Executive Committee of the FAO Asia Pacific Forestry Commission. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees of RECOFTC, the Center for People and Forests. Dr. Capistrano has published articles, book chapters and technical papers and has co-edited several books, including “The Politics of Decentralization”, “Lessons from Forest Decentralization” and “Bridging Scales and Knowledge Systems.”

Edmund Barrow grew up on one of Ireland’s first formal organic farms and was planting trees at the age of 6. This early practical experience has stayed with him and helped him focus on community level knowledge, institutions, rights, responsibilities and governance and learning from and with the rural people he has worked with. These areas have been an underlying aspect of all the work Edmund has been involved with. Edmund studied Natural Sciences in Trinity College Dublin, and has a Master’s degree in drylands development from Antioch University. He has worked in 20+ countries in Africa and globally for over 40 years. Edmund is currently a consultant in community based natural resource management and governance. Prior to this, he was Director of IUCN’s Global Ecosystem Management Programme with responsibility for IUCN’s global work on Ecosystem based Approaches to Adaptation & Disaster Risk Reduction, IUCN’s Red List of Ecosystems, and Drylands. Edmund has extensive working experience with sustainable development in different ecosystems (drylands, forests, agriculture, pastoralism), with a lot of practical field experience – especially at the local community and village levels. He has been very involved in ecosystem (especially forest) restoration, participatory approaches to conservation (planning, implementation and learning), and governance (with respect to issues such as institutional choice, representation, action learning, power).

Etelle Higonnet, attorney and environmental activist, has worked at Mighty Earth, National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, as well as two war crimes courts. She was knighted as a Chevalier de l'Ordre du merite for her pioneering efforts to curb deforestation in high-risk commodities with an emphasis on cocoa, palm oil, rubber, cattle, and soy industries. She has worked in over 30 countries, is widely published, speaks 9 languages, and is a graduate of Yale Law School.

Frank Matose is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Environmental Humanities South Centre at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests are in the political economy of conservation and commons in Africa. His recent books include an edited volume The Violence of Conservation in Africa (https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800885608/9781800885608.xml) with Maano Ramutsindela and Tafadzwa Mushonga (2022), a forthcoming monograph titled Politics of Chronic Liminality: Forests and the power of the marginalised in Southern Africa. He is a previous governing board member of the International Council for the Study of the Commons (IASC) and is an active member of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN). He is a member of the editorial boards of International Journal of the Commons, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

Ing. Humberto Campodonico Sanchez is an industrial engineer and has a Master in Economic Development at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. He is currently working as a professor at the Faculty of Economics at the National University of San Marcos. He has been linked to the Center for Studies and Promotion of Development (DESCO) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as a researcher since 1984 and as a consultant in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Since 2002 he is chief columnist for the newspaper La República. In 2010 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Economics of the University San Marcos. Between July 2011 and December 2012 he served as chairman of Petroperu. Humberto has been working with RRI since 2013 in supporting the coalition in Peru, Latin America and globally. He has written books and scholar articles about privatization, the public sector, hydrocarbons, and state reforms. He is a Fellow of the Rights and Resources since 2016.

Jenny Springer is a human rights and conservation advocate and advisor. She has an extensive background on human rights and environment linkages, rights-based approaches to conservation and climate, securing community land and resource rights, and rights-based social standards and safeguards. Types of work include thematic and policy analysis; evaluations, reviews and lesson learning; design and implementation of programs, projects and influencing strategies; and building and facilitating results-oriented collaborations.

Jintao Xu is professor of economics and director, China Center for Energy and Development (CCED), National School of Development at Peking University since September 2013. Before that he served as department head and professor at the Department of Environmental Management, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University during 2006 and 2012. His research ranges from forest tenure and regulatory reform, forest carbon and water resource allocation, transportation, to assessment of industrial performance under environmental regulation. His academic papers appeared in AJAE, World Development, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, Forest Policy and Economics, and Environment and Development Economics. Currently he serves as associate editor of AJAE, senior editor for “Regional Environmental Changes” and on the policy board for “Environment and Development Economics”. Jintao Xu also heads the Environmental Economics Program in China (EEPC) based at Peking University, one of the six world centers sponsored by SIDA. With EEPC he is building capacity to conduct rigorous economic analysis into China’s environmental and natural resource policies. Jintao Xu has frequently been involved with policy consultations with national government and international organizations. During 2000-2004, he was coordinator of the forestry and grassland taskforce under China Council for International Cooperation for Environment and Development (CCICED), and helped formulate advice to Chinese government on polices to improve implementation of China’s ecological restoration programs. Recently, he served as senior expert to China’s forest carbon management program. He is a member of the Asia-Pacific Forest Policy Think Tank under FAO, member of the Council of Scientific Advisors, Global Adaptation Institute, as well as member of Blue Ribbon Panel for Global Partnership on Ocean. He also participated in the biannual Sino-US Economic Dialogue (Track II) organized by the National Council of US-China Relations and Peking University. Jintao Xu received his master of economics degree in 1996 and Ph.D. in forestry (natural resource economics) in 1999, both at Virginia Tech. In 1988 he was conferred master of agricultural sciences in forest economics at Beijing Forestry University. In 1984 he graduated with bachelor of engineering degree at Jilin University of Technology.

Liz Alden Wily is a political economist with 40 years practice as a tenure specialist in 20 agrarian economies, in mainly Africa. She works as an independent facilitator and researcher, from community to cabinet office levels, and is an acknowledged expert on Indigenous/customary ownership regimes. She has been a prominent advocate of legal recognition of customary rights as registrable property rights for 30 years, devising accessible constructs for collective ownership by communities within which family rights are nested. She has been a leader in piloting community-based land, forest and pastoral governance regimes, and in challenging needless retention of protected areas as government or public property where unacknowledged customary possession offers a more effective and fairer path to conservation. Liz’s commitment to community property began early when she worked with San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari in Botswana and learned first-hand the perils of absent legal recognition of land rights and the consequences of weak empowerment, as stronger societies encroached San territories. This led her to establish one of the earliest minority land rights programs (1974-78), and eventually, after also working in Indonesia and Zambia, to return to school to study the political economy of property for a PhD. Liz focused in the 1990s on forest tenure, including piloting the first community-owned and managed forest reserves in Africa (Tanzania, 1994-2002). Liz has also developed innovative reforms in several post-conflict states (Liberia, Nepal, Afghanistan, Sudan/South Sudan). She continues to contribute informally to constitutional and land law reforms and supports community-led litigation challenging dispossession with technical briefs. She continues to work directly with communities, now mainly in Kenya where she lives, mentors a number of INGO, NGO and CBO programs elsewhere, and contributes to several regional and international initiatives in the now well-established community land rights sector, of which she has been part from the outset. Liz has been an active supporter of RRI since its establishment, its first nominated Fellow, and after a break from 2017, is now pleased to rejoin its ranks as a new Fellow.

Margarita Florez is a lawyer with expertise in environmental law, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), forest policy, as well as Afro-descendant and Indigenous collective tenure. She is currently the Director of the Environment and Society Association (AAS), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the promotion and defense of human and environmental rights, and has been a Collaborator of RRI at the Latin America regional level since 2010. Margarita has over 30 years of experience across the Latin American region promoting innovative and critical reforms in public environmental, forest, and tenure policies. She has led review and monitoring processes for the implementation of international environmental and human rights agreements which have benefited the participation of civil society and community based organizations in decision-making on environmental and collective tenure rights. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Third World Network (Malaysia) and the Third World Institute (Uruguay). She is the author and co-author of several books and countless articles on the environment.