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  • Department of Global Development
  • global development
Ida Djenontin headshot

Seminar Critical Development Studies, Spring 2025

Abstract

In this talk, I will highlight aspects of my critical and policy-oriented research that contribute to emerging thoughts of restoration social science. I will particularly address the human dimensions of ecosystem restoration, articulating why it is important to account for them, and how to integrate them in processes shaping ecological recovery efforts in order to foster people-centered

and socially-just ecosystem restoration. In doing so, I will also make the case for the need to enhance understanding of local socio-institutional aspects of restoration and needed equity considerations for improved policy implementation. Illustrative case studies will help to substantiate advanced arguments, exemplifying inequities we want to avoid in restoration planning, contextual social behaviors driving locally led restoration, and a handful of positive social impacts we expect to see more for socially-just restoration outcomes.

Ecosystem restoration is a globally fostered strategy to address complex, interrelated environmental degradation and climate change that induce disproportionated socio-ecological impacts on people and landscapes. Restoring ecosystems can help address biodiversity loss, adverse climate change impacts, and decreasing ecosystem services that threaten livelihoods and food security, making it relevant for local to global sustainability goals. I will focus specifically on forest landscape restoration (FLR), a tree-based ecosystem restoration approach.

About the speaker

Ida Djenontin, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State University, USA. She is a human-environment and development geographer, with a broad interdisciplinary training in environmental social science.

Ida’s critical and policy-oriented research addresses the human dimensions of global environmental and climate changes affecting forest and tree-based systems and how to achieve socioecological sustainability in the pursuit of sustainable development. Focusing on such complex forest-people relationships and related land-use changes, Ida examines the socio-institutional and policy processes that shape environmental degradation, resource conservation and restoration, and climate resilience in the Global South, especially in Africa. She questions how to equitably balance biodiversity protection, ecological health, and climate change mitigation with the livelihoods, food, and energy security needs of nature-dependent people.

Ida was previously a Visiting Fellow and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment of the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). Ida holds a dual PhD in Geography (Nature-Society Studies) and in Environmental Science & Policy from Michigan State University (US); a Master’s in Development Practice from the University of Arizona (US); and MA and BSc in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Parakou (Benin).

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson

Date & Time

March 7, 2025
3:15 pm - 4:45 pm

More information about this event.

Contact Information

Mariah Doyle-Stephenson, Administrative Assistant, Global Development

  • md2237 [at] cornell.edu

Speaker

Ida Djenontin, Assistant Professor of Geography, Penn State University

Departments

Department of Global Development

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