Professor Tucker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology who has been affiliated with the Workshop since 1996. Professor Tucker’s research explores the institutional, socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of effective natural resource management. She is particularly interested in the factors that contribute to collective action for natural resource conservation, and how processes of change impact people’s relationships with the natural environment, especially forests. Her current research includes three projects: (1) a study of the emergence of a protected cloud forest watershed managed collectively by three indigenous communities in Honduras; (2) a cross-national, comparative study of coffee farmers’ adaptations to market volatility and climate change, and implications for forest cover change, conducted with colleagues in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica; and (3) a collaborative project comparing the institutional, political and socioeconomic dimensions of reforestation trends in the states of Indiana, USA, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her book, Changing Forests: Collective Action, Common Property and Coffee in Honduras (2008), discusses how an indigenous community’s relationship with its forests has been evolving, and why its forest cover has expanded despite economic pressures that elsewhere have been associated with deforestation. Her recent articles have been published in Human Ecology, Ecology and Society, Latin American Research Review, Conservation and Society, Society and Natural Resources, and Environmental Management.
Professor Tucker’s work contributes to the Workshop’s long-standing interests in the institutional dimensions of common-pool resource management, and comparative analyses of natural resource governance. She works with the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) Research Program, one of the Workshop’s collaborative efforts, which examines how local institutional arrangements influence forest conditions and change processes in communities around the world. This fall she is co-teaching E622, “Empirical Theory and Methods” with Burney Fischer, another Workshop colleague. E622 introduces graduate students to theories and research methods addressing the institutional dimensions of human-environment relationships, with special emphasis on IFRI methodology. Students apply IFRI methods through fieldwork in a nearby community. The class will culminate in a report to the community and a working paper that presents the results.
