Our next institutional support member is the Swedish University of Agriculture Science (SLU), represented by Linda Engström, researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development. Through her insights you’ll learn more about the division’s research on the politics of environment and rural transformations. Happy reading!
Photo: Linda Engström in one of her study sites in eastern Tanzania, learning about how smallholder farmers are affected by a planned large-scale agro-investment in the area.
To continue the presentation of our institutional support members in our Behind the Research series, it’s now time for the Swedish University of Agriculture Science (SLU), represented by Linda Engström, researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development.
Through her insights, you’ll learn more about the division’s research on the politics of environment and rural transformations in the Global South – exploring issues such as land use, labor regimes, and natural resource management – and how this work deepens our understanding of development and its underlying power relations.
Happy Reading!
Can you please introduce yourself and your research group?
– I’m Linda Engström, and I’m a researcher at the Department of Urban and Rural Development at SLU, Uppsala. My department teaches a range of social science topics and at my division of Rural Development, we are a group of researchers focusing solely the politics of environment and rural transformations in the Global South, across a wide range of disciplines.
Can you give examples of the type of research you do in your research group/department?
– One of the key strands of research, is the management of natural resources with a focus on power relations, and several of us study processes of commodification, privatisation, exploitation of populations and territories across rural settings in South America, Asia and Africa.
– The group consists of researchers from various disciplines including human geography, anthropology and political science, empirically covering everything from labor regimes at sea in Thailand, land use in secondary forests in Peru, to wildlife-human conflicts in Nepal and land grabbing in East Africa. The bulk share of our research is qualitative, but with a growing integration of quantitative methods.
Why is your group’s/department’s research important, and how can it contribute to development?
– In my view, everything we do at our division can be used to better understand “development”, its problematic underlying assumptions and inherent structural challenges, and thus why and how it rarely produces the outcomes that are expected. To understand these processes are crucial for if, and how, “development” is imposed on some groups of people, by other groups of people.
What interesting work does your group/department have lined up in the next 12 months?
– In the upcoming 12 months, we will take part in the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) 2026 in Barcelona.