Michael Redclift

Michael Redclift "research interests include sustainable development, global environmental change, environmental security and the modern food system. He has undertaken research in Spain, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico and the United Kingdom. His research on the production and consumption relations under the ESRC/AHRC Programme ‘Cultures of Consumption’, was published in 2004 by Taylor and Francis in New York as Chewing Gum: the fortunes of taste. He has completed (2006) a major comparative study of frontier societies and their relations with the natural environment for MIT Press: Frontiers: histories of civil societies and nature.

"Michael was the first Director of the Global Environmental Change programme of the ESRC between 1990 and 1995. Between 1973 and 1997 he was at Imperial College at Wye, ultimately as Professor of Environmental Sociology. He has coordinated research grants for the European Commission (FM IV and V) and helped initiate the TERM programme of the European Science Foundation. In addition he has evaluated the research programmes of the Norwegian Research Council (RCN), the Netherlands Research Council (NRP), and other European research initiatives, including the Tyndall Centre in the UK.

"Michael is currently Professor of International Environmental Policy in the Department of Geography at King’s College, London. In 2006 he was the first recipient of the ‘Frederick Buttel Award’, from the International Sociological Association, for “ an outstanding contribution to international scholarship in environmental sociology”."

Research Funding

 * 2007-2010: £405,000 ESRC grant for 'Human Security and local governance: negotiating environmental risk management under rapid urbanisation in the Yucatan (Mexican Carribean)', with Mark Pelling and David Manuel Navarrete.

Select Publications

 * “Sustainable Development (1987-2005) – an Oxymoron Comes of Age”, Sustainable Development Journal, (In press).

Early Books
In 1988 in the Journal of Rural Studies Timothy O'Riordan writes that: "In many ways he is not radical enough. He pulls his punches when looking at the links between aid, corporate hegemony and impoverishment. He does not pay enough attention to the plight of women and children in the marginalisation process, he leaves out the role of busy-body middlemen who grow fat as usurers in an appalling unjust system of debt collection and intimidation." In also adds how the book "play[s] down the link between non-sustainability and militarism." (p.180)
 * Michael Redclift, Sustainable development: Exploring the contradictions (Methuen, 1987).

Related Sourcewatch articles

 * Edward Page