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Jennifer Franco Researcher

Our people — Staff member

Jennifer C. Franco is a research associate in the Agrarian and Environmental Justice as well as the 'Myanmar in Focus' Programmes of TNI, and an adjunct professor at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD) of the China Agricultural University in Beijing.

She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) Alumnae Group, sits on the board of ACKnowl-EJ (Academic-Activist Co-Produced Knowledge for Environmental Justice), serves on the editorial advisory board of the journal Environment and Planning -- E: Nature and Space, and on the editorial board of Journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society.

She has a PhD in political science, and works in a scholar-activist tradition. Her original and continuing research interest is on the role of rural politics in broader democratisation processes, and specifically the role of deep social reforms of agrarian structures and institutions and agrarian movements in these political processes.

Her continuing action research and political work are focused on the politics of natural resources (land, water, seas and forests) and agrarian movement building and mobilisation. In this work, food politics and the struggle for food sovereignty are central, and within these themes her specific contribution is on the politics of natural resources, with specific focus on land.

She has ongoing work on the intersection of climate change politics (mitigation and adaptation), and how these intersect with resource grabbing, that in turn provoke old and new conflicts. She also has ongoing work on global governance instruments and principles (human rights, accountability mechanisms, and so on), law and justice, as well as conflict resolution mechanisms, and how all these are interpreted and implemented in politically contested processes.

She has carried out work at international civil society platforms and spaces and in several countries over the years, and especially in Myanmar in recent years where she is currently doing work on land policy and politics as a team member of the TNI 'Myanmar in Focus' Programme.

Her academic and non-academic publications include popular primers and journal articles and co-edited journal special issues on these topics, including several articles on land grabbing, conflict and justice, biofuels, Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), transnational agrarian movements, among others. She guest edited (with L. Mehta and G.J. Veldwisch) a special issue of Water Alternatives on water grabbing.

She published two monographs: Elections and Democratization in the Philippines (Routledge) and Bound by Law: Filipino Rural Poor and the Search for Justice in a Plural-Legal Landscape (Ateneo University Press; University of Hawaii Press), the latter was a finalist for the National Book Awards (Social Sciences) in the Philippines.

She has published in major academic journals including Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Current Issues in Environmental Sustainability, Globalizations, Third World Quarterly, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

She has continuing interest and initiatives in further developing some key activist ideas that she helped conceptualize together with other collaborators, such as 'flex crops', 'agrarian climate justice', 'land sovereignty', and 'land and food sovereignty.'

Latest work

  • Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

    • Land Sovereignty
    • Land and Water Grabbing
    • Climate Crisis
    Cover image

    This book is about scholar-activism and political struggles for land. Scholar-activism is a way of working that tries to change society by combining the best features of radical academic and political activist traditions, despite the many contradictions and challenges that this entails. The role played by scholar-activists in land struggles is important, but is not straightforward. This book unapologetically celebrates the contributions of scholar-activism in land struggles and scholarship, but more than this, it is about exploring the contradictions and challenges facing scholar-activism. It is neither a glorification of the achievements of scholar-activism, nor a set of prescriptive propositions on how to ‘do’ scholar-activism. Rather, it addresses contentious issues in scholar-activism, many of which are rarely discussed, or are discussed only gingerly and awkwardly when they cannot be avoided. It is a book written by two scholar-activists who have focused their individual and collaborative research and activist works on the politics of land and the role played by radical agrarian movements. Insights in this book are drawn on the experiences of the authors working in the three main sites of global knowledge circuits: academic institutions, independent research institutions oriented to practical politics, and left-wing agrarian movements. Order Print Copy

    Book by
    • Jun Borras
    • Jennifer Franco

  • The 5Rs in Myanmar Five principles for a future federal democratic system where rural working people can flourish

    Land Policy in Myanmar

    This primer is about ‘the 5Rs’ and land and natural resource politics. The 5Rs is a set of five principles: Recognition, Restitution, Redistribution, Regeneration, and Representation/Resistance. The primer briefly explores the idea of a working people’s program on land and natural resources in Myanmar based on these five principles in the context of a future federal democratic system. Order print copy

    Primer by
    • Jennifer Franco
    • Jun Borras

  • ပို၍ ေကာင္းမြန္နိုင္သည့္ Covid-19 အေရးေပၚစီးပြားေရးကုစားမႈအစီအစဥ္ အတြက္ စဥ္းစားခ်က္မ်ား

    Myanmar Commentary

    ဧၿပီလေနာက္ဆုံးတပတ္တြင္ အစိုးရမွထုတ္ျပန္လိုက္ေသာ Covid-19 စီးပြားေရးကုစားမႈအစီအစဥ္ (CERP) သည္ ကိုရိုနာဗိုင္းရပ္စ္အမ်ိဳးအစားအသစ္ေၾကာင့္ ႏွစ္ႏွာမႈမ်ားၾကဳံေတြ႕ရကာ တစ္နိုင္ငံလုံးအတိုင္းအတာျဖင့္ ဗိုင္းရပ္စ္ျပန႔္ပြားမႈကို တားဆီးရန္ lockdown ေဆာင္ရြက္ရေသာေၾကာင့္ စီးပြားေရး ထိခိုက္မႈအက်ိဳးဆက္ ခံစားေနရမႈမ်ားအတြက္ ပံ့ပိုးမႈျပဳနိုင္ရန္ ႀကိဳဆိုရမည့္ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္အသစ္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

    Article by
    • Walden Bello
    • Jennifer Franco
    • Pietje Vervest
See all work by Jennifer Franco

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