The Environment and Development Research Circle

The Environment and Development Advanced Research Circle (EDARC) provides an interdisciplinary forum to discuss issues of the interface of environmental change, environmental management, and economic development. The latest phase of EDARC targets key areas of uncertainty that exist in contemporary understandings of the relationship between globalization and the environment. An important area of recent interest concerns the social processes that run through divergent spatial and social organizational scales that link global trends to local realities.

During 2004-6, EDARC activities will focus one particular global-local linkage: the worldwide application of western ecological sciences to situations with divergent ecologies and societies. Activities focus on building constructive dialogues between institutionally separated research areas in the social and natural sciences on campus and beyond to look more closely and critically at 1) the use of applied ecological sciences in conservation and development planning in the developing world, and 2) the significance of non-western social and ecological knowledge for environmental planning