Forests and Forest Peoples

The second part of the module is based on the presentation Forests and Forest Peoples competing territories and jurisdictions by Dr. Marcus Colchester. The presentation focuses on forest peoples’ land use and ownership and it was given as a part of the Who owns our forests? – Public, Private and Communal Ownership IFSA webinar in January 2021. Find the whole webinar here along with the audience questions and timestamps in the description. The presentation slides can be found here.

Dr. Marcus Colchester has a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He was Founder Director of the Forest Peoples Programme and now acts as Senior Policy Advisor. Marcus has over 35 years’ experience working with forest peoples in the humid tropics. His expertise is in indigenous peoples, social and political ecology, standard setting, human rights, environment, development, land tenure, policy reform advocacy, ‘Free, Prior and Informed Consent’ and conflict resolution. Marcus has worked intensively in support of forest peoples’ rights in relation to logging, plantations, palm oil, extractive industries, dams, colonisation and protected areas. 

His human rights advocacy related to development and conservation has earned him a conservation fellowship at the Royal Anthropological Institute Lucy Mair Medal for applied anthropology. He has received an honorary doctorate of Letters from Oxford Brookes University. He has published extensively in academic journals and is the author and editor of numerous books including The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests published in 1993 with Larry Lohmann and Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Biodiversity Conservation.