Because of his life experiences and extensive research, Jesse Ribot is able to put a human face on issues facing Developing World populations such as the effects of climate change on rural peoples or the management of their natural resources.
When Ribot, a former Senior Associate at the World Resources Institute and now a Beckman Institute and University of Illinois faculty member, talks or writes about woodcutters or fishers in small villages in Africa it is with the voice of an expert with firsthand knowledge. He has lived in the forest villages and studied the impact of natural resource management driven by forces outside the villagers’ control.
As an example, Ribot says, different organizations can make claims on a natural resource such as a river that has been fished by locals for generations. A foreign gold company may have been awarded mineral rights by the fishers’ national government but, after fishing the river for perhaps hundreds of years, the local people also have a claim. If the environmental effects of the gold mining prove harmful to the fish downstream, then the fisher’s resource is affected.
I’m interested in issues of justice for rural poor populations. Are they secure, are they represented, do they have access to the resources they need.
– Jesse Ribot
“So the global demand for gold is shaping this local person’s ability to sustain themselves on the fisheries,” Ribot said. “Although there are local conventions for managing and preventing overfishing, their whole convention for management is obliterated by something that is on a scale that has to be dealt with by governments, states, international treaties, and with them the voice of that fisher is rarely ever heard.
“My concern is: how do we get that voice in there. The fisher has a traditional claim even without title or right because traditionally, or as with common law, he has some claim.”
Bringing the rights and the voices of often poor and disenfranchised people living in remote areas into the worldwide roundtable discussion of topics like climate change and resource management has been a passion for Ribot for two decades. He has been around the world, living with villagers in places like Senegal, taking part in seminal world conferences on the environment, and studying issues that often get overlooked by others, such as the daunting problems facing some of the poorest regions on earth.
Both the World Bank and the United Nations have called on Ribot often as an expert in the areas of local government and the environment, climate change as it relates to the vulnerability of local peoples, and access to resources by local peoples. He worked for nine years as a Senior Associate at the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think tank concerned with protecting the environment while also improving the lives of people.
Ribot’s work isn’t easy to define by typical scientific research markers, but the place he is now carving out for himself in academia is one that will have increased relevance as topics like resource management, global warming, and the rights of poor and/or indigenous populations grab our attention in the future.
“I’m interested in issues of justice for rural poor populations,” Ribot said. “Are they secure, are they represented, do they have access to the resources they need.”
Ribot studied physics and linguistics as an undergrad but in graduate school veered toward the type of topics he has been focusing on for twenty years in his professional life. He earned a Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, then won Fellowships at the Max Planck Institute, Harvard, Yale, and also at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He came to Illinois as an excellence hire.
“I was delighted and thought it was an appropriate moment to go from this world of applied non-governmental institutions into academia,” Ribot said.
Ribot recently joined the Geography Department at the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute, approaching issues through the means of academic research and educational outreach. He is hoping to leverage his previous work with the World Resources Institute and as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center into a major research line at Illinois.
Ribot is lead person for the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP) initiative at Illinois, a five-year experimental research line that is centered in and supported by the Illinois School of Earth, Society and Environment, the campus, and Beckman. The approach to issues and problems in the SDEP will incorporate many dimensions. Ribot says that institutions, implicit values, and laws “all shape how people behave and use resources” and that nexus is at the heart of his research.