Organizers
Biodata of Organising Committee members IASC 2023 Nairobi
W. Onyango-Ouma, BA; MA; PhD; Associate Research Professor and Director at the Institute of Anthropology, Gender and African Studies, University of Nairobi with 20 years’ experience in teaching and research. As an anthropologist he has an extensive background and experience in socio-behavioural research on a range of topics including children/youth, cultural change and development, healthcare, environmental ethics/conservation, food security and social protection, among others.
Boniface Peter Kiteme, BA; MA (Planning) UON; PhD (Human Geography), University of Bern Switzerland. He is a Senior Research Scientist/Director Centre for Training and Integrated Research in ASAL Development (CETRAD), Kenya. Areas of interest include Sustainable regional development; integrated natural resources management and governance; participatory land use planning; food systems, poverty and rural livelihoods; food-water-energy security nexus;; research-policy-practice interface; transdisciplinarity and evidence-based decision making processes. Dr. Kiteme is also a part-time lecturer at the Department of Geography, University of Nairobi, and a UNESCO Co-chair on Natural and Cultural Heritage for Sustainable Mountain Development. He sits in various local and international Research and Developments Boards.
Prof. Nzioka John Muthama is an applied meteorologist and has over 30 years’ experience of teaching at university of Nairobi. He has contributed to the understanding of the environmental risk management as regards air quality, climate diagnostics, climate change, Environmental governance, peace and, policy. His current research interest is in Air quality assessment, Sustainability metrics, Climate Change and Climate Governance, rehabilitation and regeneration of degraded environments through Honey Supply chain, Urban sustainability and Leadership modelling- readiness and maturity modelling. He has supervised over twenty postgraduate students. He has published, with his research collaborators, over 60 scientific articles and book chapters, in addition to policy briefs.
Dr. Stellah Mukhovi (MA, PhD Human Geography of the University of Nairobi) is a postdoc scholar and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Population, and Environmental Studies, University of Nairobi, Kenya. She has over twenty years of University teaching, research and consultancy in the broad areas of gender issues, food systems sustainability, land based natural resources management, rural-urban linkages, and rural livelihoods. In addition, she has great interest of research in Arid and Semi-arid environments (ASALs) on various topics related to common pool resources, climate change adaptation, resilience and food sustainability; linking research to sustainability transformation at community and policy levels. She has accumulated experience in managing complex north-south research initiatives of multidisciplinary and intercultural settings.
Boniface N. Wambua holds a doctor of philosophy degree in agricultural geography specializing in food security in the semi-arid environments. He has over 29 years of university teaching, training, administration and research. He has supervised several local and foreign postgraduate students and published in reputable international journals and participated in many workshops, conferences and seminars at international and national levels as key player. In addition, he has been involved as a research consultant in several National and Regional research projects funded by International Organizations, Regional organizations and Government Ministries/Parastatals in the area of environmental planning management and governance and climate change, transboundary resource management, food security issues, dryland resources management and livelihood systems among others.
Robinson Kinuthia Ngugi, PhD is an Associate Professor in Range Management at the University of Nairobi with close to 40 years of university teaching, research, consulting and community outreach on a broad range of thematic areas including but not limited to integrated livestock production and management, climate change and agricultural adaptation in dry lands. Prof Kinuthia has initiated and implemented over numerous collaborative partnerships projects between the university and local, regional and international organizations. He has held several administrative responsibilities at departmental and faculty level, and supervised many students and published widely.
Tobias Haller is since 2014 holding a professorship in social anthropology at the University of Bern, where he is also co-director of the institute of social anthropology. He is doing research and teaching on the commons in Africa and Switzerland and looked at institutional changes from a new institutionalism and political ecology perspective. He has also worked on fossil fuel extraction, mining, mega-infrastructure projects and conservation and its impacts on the commons (commons grabbing). He was co-organizer of the IASC conference in Bern 2016 and is since 2021 the regional coordinator of the Europe + CIS group of the IASC. He has published many monographs and edited volume, the last two with Routledge on ‘The Commons in a Glocal World’ and ‘Balancing the Commons in Switzerland’.
Sabin Bieri, is Co-Director of the Centre for Development and Environment CDE at the University of Bern. Her main research interest refers to the social dimension of sustainability, specifically inequality, poverty, food systems, labor markets and gender relations from a global and commons related perspective, aiming at bridging between academic debates, public policy and practice. Her recent research investigated the effects of boom crops and feminization in agriculture in the global South, thereby managing a team of roughly 20 researchers across four continents (www.fate.unibe.ch). As co-principal investigator in another interdisciplinary project on integrative sustainability assessments of food systems, Sabin specializes in multistakeholder processes. Her team designs deliberations to assess the sustainability of value chains in view of a more sustainable food system in Switzerland.
Sonja Merten, PhD and PD, is leading the research unit “Society, Gender and Health” at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (SwissTPH) in Basel, Switzerland. She is a public health specialist working and publishing on equity in access to health services. She has an interest in the impact of structural and land use change on health from a feminist perspective, making a link to the use of common-pool resources and access to commons property.
Jakob Zinssag, Prof. Dr. med. vet., PhD, Dip. ECVPH, is a Group Leader of Human and Animal Health and One Health that the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (SwissTPH) in Basel, Switzerland. He is working on the issue on how to relate human and animal health as one health and doing applied research among nomadic pastoralists in Africa and elsewhere using the One Health approach for zoonoses control and improving the health of mobile populations. We demonstrate the synergistic potentials of closer cooperation.
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