Professor Bram Buscher

Bram is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies of the University of Johannesburg, research associate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of Stellenbosch University, and will hold a Van Zijl Slabbert visiting professorship at the University of Cape Town from April-June 2017.

From 2008–2015, he was Assistant and later Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Bram received his PhD (cum laude) from the VU University Amsterdam in 2009 and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa from September 2008 to January 2012.

His research interests revolve around the political economy of conservation and development, the politics of energy and extraction, ecotourism, new media and social theory. In 2011, he received an NWO (Dutch Research Foundation) Veni grant for a research project entitled ‘Nature 2.0: The Political Economy of Conservation in Online and Southern African Environments’. In 2015, he was awarded an NWO Vidi grant to investigate Crisis Conservation situations in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa together with three PhDs and two postdocs.

Bram has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and is the author of ‘Transforming the Frontier. Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa’ (2013). Since 2012, Bram has been one of the editors of the open-access journal Conservation and Society and a book series with the University of Arizona Press on Critical Green Engagements: investigating the Green Economy and its Alternatives.

For more information, and access to publications, see Bram’s website. You can also follow Bram on Twitter via @brambuscher.