Dr  Tomas Frederiksen - Research

My research is located in the marchlands between development studies and environmental and political geography. It brings together theoretical and policy questions of environmental change, international development and socio-environmental justice in the global South through historically-rich and multi-scalar analyses of the political ecologies of environmental governance and natural resource extraction. My current research examines historical and contemporary natural resource extraction and international development in three ways:

Transnational environmental governance and international development 

An interest in the processes, policies and institutions through which environmental change in the global South is constituted and its consequences for international development. In particular, how the practices of mining companies on the Zambian Copperbelt are shaped through international, national and local regulatory pressures producing specific socio-environmental justice outcomes.

The political ecology of natural resource extraction in Africa

An interest in the political and economic origins of environmental and social change with a focus on the political struggles and institutions surrounding changing forms of access to and control over resources and the politics of knowledge production.

The historical and contemporary geographies of colonialism in Africa

An interest in the ways in which states and private actors worked together to expand and entrench new forms of power relations, behaviours and environmental practice in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries and its enduring consequences with a focus on Nigeria and Zambia.