Blaikie, Piers (1942–)

Piers Macleod Blaikie, professor emeritus at the School of International Studies at the University of East Anglia, has been one of the principal voices in political ecology (PE) from its inception, providing decades of pathbreaking thinking, research, and writing. Blaikie received his geography degrees from Cambridge University, was assigned to the department of geography at the University of Reading (1968–1972), and then moved to East Anglia, where he remained for 33 years in the School of Development Studies (now the School of International Development). He conducted his PhD dissertation research in northwestern India from 1966 to 1970 on the spatial organization of agriculture and consolidation of landholdings in north Indian villages. He followed this with research on the family planning program in northeast India from 1971 to 1973, with a subsequent long stretch of work in Nepal writing on underdevelopment and center-periphery theory. He reported his fieldwork in three coauthored books: Crisis in Nepal, Peasants and Workers in Nepal, and Struggle for Basic Needs in Nepal. Through consultancies and research, he continued to work in India and Nepal for more than 40 years, and in the Himalayas more generally, including Pakistan, Bhutan, and China. He has also worked in Morocco and many of the countries of Central and Southern Africa.

Blaikie visited the United States as a guest professor often—at Clark, UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) twice, UC Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii twice. He has also lectured at Harvard's Institute for International Development and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was also a visiting professor at Australian National University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

In 1985, Blaikie wrote The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries, and subsequently coauthored Land Degradation and Society with Harold Brookfield. These two texts were foundational in the rising subdiscipline of political ecology, particularly the first book. He continued with political ecology into the 1990s and also with several other research projects, including AIDS in Africa, with significant fieldwork in Uganda. In 1994, he coauthored At Risk, which, now in its second edition, is widely used in university courses as well as by policymakers and practitioners and has been translated into several languages. He then moved into the politics of environmental policy, and from this perspective, he produced numerous articles and a book, Policy in High Places. In the late 1990s, he wrote a series of review articles on PE and development, most notably in Zeitschrift, and Environment and Planning A. In 2006, Blaikie researched, with Oliver Springate-Baginski, the “political ecology” of forestry, justice, and tribal rights in India and Nepal. Since 2003, he has collaborated in an ongoing multicountry study on comparative environmental policy in the Himalayan region, including work in China. This project focuses on the translation of environmental policy from international to national to local scales with transformations of meaning and practice throughout, adopting a new policy analysis methodology to investigate the relative efficacy of participatory and “crisis”-legitimated “fortress” approaches to biodiversity conservation in terms of environmental outcomes, social marginalization, and poverty alleviation.

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