Edmund Barrow

Edmund grew up on one of the few (at the time) organic farms in Ireland, where he was exposed to growing hedges, feeding cattle, making manure and compost, growing barley, wheat, and potatoes, and planting trees. Edmund went to Trinity College Dublin, where he studied natural science. Since then, he has worked for more than forty years, mainly in Africa (as well as Asia and the Americas), in more than twenty countries with a focus on community-based natural resource management that emphasizes decentralized governance, respect for local and indigenous knowledge and institutions, and learning. Edmund strongly believes in and has extensive experience with participatory approaches to environmental management and livelihood security. He focuses on indigenous and local knowledge and institutions. He pioneered village-level environmental and land use planning at local and landscape levels (e.g., Sudan, Somaliland, Uganda) as well as forest landscape restoration (Shinyanga, Turkana, in East Africa in the 1980s). Edmund firmly believes in focusing on local learning, benefit sharing, natural resource management, forest conservation, and their linkages with economic growth. He has published widely, and he has placed emphasis on practical lessons, experiences, and learning to better enable rural people to benefit from conservation. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya, with his wife and with their two sons.