Carol Colfer

Carol J Pierce Colfer is a senior associate with CIFOR-ICRAF. She joined CIFOR in 1994, initially as a consultant for the Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management project, joining as a staff member in 1996. She was the first leader of the Local People, Devolution and Adaptive Collaborative Management Programme (ACM), which involved research in Asia, Africa and Latin America from 1998 to 2002. From 2002 until mid-2003, she was on sabbatical leave at Cornell University, analysing results from this programme. Following this, she worked on human health, forests and decentralization. From 2007 to 2009, she coordinated CIFOR’s Rights and Resources Initiative project and the Governance theme of the Landscape Mosaics project in the Biodiversity platform. In 2009, she left Bogor, Indonesia, becoming a Senior Associate, and focused on swidden agriculture in the tropics, gender, and intersectionality until 2018. At Cornell she was also involved in an Integrative Graduate Education, Research and Training programme on Food Systems and Poverty Alleviation in Africa at Cornell Institute for International Food, Agriculture and Development as a Visiting Fellow (2009-2014). She is now a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia programme. In 2017, she made a return research visit to Bushler Bay, Washington in cooperation with the US Forest Service, assessing the use of rapid rural appraisal tools in rural America. More recently she has contributed to the GREAT (Gender Responsive Researchers Equipped for Agriculture Transformation) programme, which also focuses on East Africa (Cornell and Makerere University). Her current work includes a retrospective analysis of masculinities in Bushler Bay, WA in the United States, East Kalimantan and West Sumatra, primarily. Colfer has a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Portland State University (Oregon), a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Hawaii and an MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Washington (Seattle).