Dr. McConnell is an Associate Professor within Global Change and Earth Observations at Michigan State University. As a land change scientist, he applies a mixed Cultural/Political Ecology- Geographic Information Sciences approach to questions of land use dynamics from local to global scales. He has spent the past 25 years in interdisciplinary research groups, including the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, the Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change and the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change at Indiana University, and the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University.
Research Interests
- Socio-political and environmental dynamics
- Land use/change
- Coupled natural and human (CNH) systems
- Conservation
- Land use decision-making
- Agriculture
Involvement
Dr. McConnell manages an international, multi-institutional research project supported through the Belmont Forum’s Food Security and Land Use Call. He has done work in Africa (e.g., Madagascar, Mali, Kenya) and Asia (e.g., China, Nepal), and has recently begun to extend his work to South America (e.g., Brazil, Colombia). Many of these sites involve protected areas intended to conserve rare or endangered wildlife, the research concerns the impacts of conservation actions on the agricultural livelihoods of people nearby, or even inside, the protected areas.
Scalar dynamics have been a key question driving his research, which he addresses through comparative studies across research sites, and in synthesis work aimed at deriving more general understanding of the causes and consequences of land use decision-making. This comparative and synthesis work has been cross-continental—and even global—in scope, involving both methodological and theoretical concerns.