Seema Arora-Jonsson

I am Professor of Rural Development and Chair for the subject, Rural Development in the Global North. I work with questions of sustainability and justice in environmental governance, climate transitions and rural development across the global North and South. 

Together with my research group, Rural Development in the Global North, I work on questions of rural transformation and environmental politics in Sweden and Europe. We bring a critical perspective to development and environmental governance in the global North, whose own development has been often taken as the unproblematic template for the rest of the world. We engage with local rural and indigenous groups in Sweden, emphasizing the vital contribution of rural and indigenous lives in confronting global challenges of sustainability and climate change.

To this end, our group includes an outreach subgroup. We are responsible for a governmental mission, Uppdrag Landsbygd, tasked with strengthening research on rural areas and providing policy relevant knowledge for decision-makers in Sweden. I also collaborate with international agencies such as Oxfam, UN Women, UNDP and FAO and have been part of the International Panel for Climate Change Report for 2022. 

I am a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry where I sit in the the academy's research committee and am an office holder in IUFRO, the International Union of Forest Research Organizations. I am on the boards of sustainability initiatives/institutes in the UK and Finland. My administrative work at the university includes work at the faculty level where I sit on the Professors Appointment Board. 

My research is shaped by the need to decolonize development and environmental governance in particular contexts but within wider transnational currents and relations. Feminist thinking and questions of gender, race, ethnicity (indigeneity), class, geography are central to all my work.  

Across the diverse contexts —the contested and gendered politics of forest governance, resource extraction, the work of natural resource bureaucracies, the geopolitical and citizenship implications of climate programs, rural governance and the politics of migration and sustainability in Sweden as well as climate transitions, I am committed to working towards inclusive, reflexive, and socially just knowledge production and action.

A critical subjectivity informs my work and I work with participatory approaches where along with scientific inquiry, different ways of knowing are acknowledged as important in creating knowledge and a space for change. For example, in collaborative inquiries with women in villages, the participants themselves shaped the inquiry and the research became a site of emancipatory politics through collective work and organising. 

I analyze rural, environmental, and climate questions through a North–South and translocal perspective, using “North–South” not only geographically but analytically. By relating, connecting and comparing places, I explore how global discourses and uneven relations of power, development, and environmental knowledges may set the limits for transitioning with justice but also how they may be used subversively to challenge dominant frameworks and  bring change in the everyday. 

While my research is critical of existing structures of development, climate, and sustainability, I do not simply reject them. Instead, I seek to engage with these systems, using their contradictions to conceptualize and act for meaningful change.