Helena Varkkey

Dr Helena Varkkey is a social scientist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her area of specialization is political geography and environmental politics in Southeast Asia, especially on the politics of palm oil and atmospheric pollution (haze) in the region. For the past 15 years of her academic career, she has been researching issues of sustainability and governance within the palm oil industry. Her monograph, published in 2016, explores how political patronage can affect land use patterns in ways that can lead to unsustainable plantation expansion and fires, resulting in the persistent transboundary haze across the Southeast Asian region. Since then, she has broadened her net to look at other related issues in the sector, to better understand how development and sustainability can truly exist hand in hand within this part of the world which is so blessed with natural resources. Over the years, she has worked with social scientists from differing backgrounds (including economics, sociology, and anthropology) as well as natural scientists (botanists, soil scientists, agriculturists) to further comprehend the complexity of this ‘wicked problem’. She maintains an academic blog at helenavarkkey.wordpress.com