Kenneth Iain MacDonald

Ken MacDonald is the Interim Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and is cross-appointed to the Department of Human Geography and the Dept. of Global Development Studies. His research has spanned several areas, with a focus on political ecology and biodiversity conservation. Much of his field research has been based in the mountains of northern Pakistan examining how biodiversity conservation has benefitted the interests of the state, NGOs and private actors rather than local communities.  More recently he has focused on the cultural politics of environmental governance, exploring how institutions of environmental governance like the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have produced biodiversity conservation as a means of capital accumulation, ultimately expressed through forms of valuation and financialization that result in new forms of dispossession and alienation from land. This work brings ethnographic practice to the study of transnational institutions of environmental governance and has been published in a number of journals including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Journal of Peasant Studies, Global Environmental Politics and Development and Change, among others. He has also served on the Executive of IUCN's Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy and as chair of its Committee on Culture and Biodiversity.