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Claudio Delang (Visiting Project Researcher)

Research Interests

My research interests lie primarily in the area of sustainable development, rural development and environmental resource management in developing countries, addressed from multiple perspectives, including the economic, ecological, social and cultural.

1. Attitudes towards economic development and environmental conservation.
The emphasis on the psychological, ethical, and cultural relationships of rural populations with the environment, and with their attitude towards development, is an important part of my research. This issue was the focus of my PhD thesis, which questioned the ways in which the different relationships of two ethnic groups with space, place, and the environment contributed to their dissimilar attitudes towards development opportunities.

2. Rural development and environmental management from an economic perspective.
Environmental economics approaches have been part of my research on rural development processes in Thailand, and they continue to be central to my current post-doctoral research on the value of non-timber forest products (NTFP) used by swidden farmers. I began conducting research on the economic valuation of natural resources while at the Centre for Ecological Economics of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where I carried out field research in protected areas and coastal areas in the south of Thailand. I was able to incorporate this contextual and theoretical knowledge to my teaching in a Masters program in Ecological Economics at the Department of Economics at Chulalongkorn University. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, my PhD utilized a number of economic methodologies in combination with sociocultural perspectives to gauge the varying responses of the members of different ethnic minority groups to increasing Thai government intervention, so as to obtain more nuanced, balanced perspectives on complex development situations. In the wake of the courses I taught on environmental economics in Franklin College, Switzerland and in Thailand, I hope to continue interrogating the use of economic valuations of natural resources in developing contexts.

3. The politics of conservation and development, specifically with respect to natural resource management
Within a political ecology approach, I am interested in the relationship between rural development and environmental conservation, and the various constructions of these notions by different groups, including rural farmers, NGOs, and the state. This is an ongoing concern beginning with my involvement in a Thai NGO - the Rural Development Foundation, in 1997 - in which I witnessed the tensions between the reliance of rural populations upon the natural environment, and the constraints to development due to people’s values, attitudes and outlook, within the wider political and social setting. Environmental conservation is a powerful discourse appropriated by various groups to serve different purposes - social, economic, and often political - and I examined the intertwining of these discourses in papers published in Society and Natural Resources, and Geography. I hope to follow up on this area of inquiry in other regions of Southeast Asia and beyond.

4. Multi-disciplinary approaches
What I have found especially valuable in my work is the merging of principles and techniques from various disciplines and perspectives. In my post-doctoral research, I combine ideas from political economy, environmental economics and cultural ecology to look at rural people’s use of the natural environment, and at the ways in which such uses change due to government intervention. In particular, I study the importance of NTFP to the livelihoods of the members of an ethnic minority group that practices subsistence swidden farming in protected forests in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam (publications in Environmental Management, Ecological Economics and Economic Botany). I am keen to continue exploring ways in which such a multi-disciplinary approach can lead to more constructive and viable understandings of ‘development’ in developing countries, and to improve insights into the constraints and consequences of development initiatives in rural areas in developing countries.

Research Activities in 2005 Fiscal Year

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