Kristina Marquardt

My research focuses on smallholders’ diverse and dynamic land uses for food production, agrarian change, forest transitions and maintenance of ecosystem services in the landscape. Right now I'm leading a research project that studies how farmers in Nepal invest long-term in the landscape and the role of secondary forests for smallholders in the Peruvian Amazon. 

During the last years, I have been working in several  research projects that focus on how small-scale land use can contribute to maintaining ecosystem services in the landscape, how these land uses are transforming due to ongoing socio-economic changes and how they are affected by agricultural and forest policies:

- Secondary forests, commodity frontiers and the micro-politics of land claims: struggling to build smallholder forest futures (ongoing - started 2023).

- Wild animals - biodiversity or pest? Creating local dialogues for dealing with farming-wildlife conflicts in rural Himalayan landscapes (ongoing - started 2023).

- Living with uncertainty in South Asia Mountains (ongoing network project - started 2023).

- What is secondary about secondary forest? Building smallholder forest futures in Peru’s Amazonian frontier (ongoing - started 2022).

- The pratice of resilience in moutain landscapes: exploring risk and landscape investments in rural Nepal (2018-2024). This project is about what resilience means in practice for small-scale farmers in Nepal. The project aims to investigate what strategies and practices the farmers use to manage the risks they face in their everyday lives, especially through the long-term investments they make in the landscape in which they live. It can for example be to manage forests for specific purposes, building terraces and irrigation facilities.

- Forest and agrarian transition, smallholder practices and new forms of land governance (2018-2021). The project is an inter-disciplinary network project between researchers in Brazil, Nepal, Peru and Sweden. The project aims to re-examine current theoretical models of changing forest and agricultural landscapes, and to better understand what local effects new forms of land governance have on small-scale land uses.

-Thinking beyond REDD: analysing smallholders' motivations and actions for ecosystem serivce managment (2015-2019). In this research we suggests that we rethink how we intend future management and governance of ecosystem services (ES) and how climate mitigation measures can be achieved. We approach ES from a landscape perspective and try to better understand smallholder motivation and measures for ES management and how these can promote forest cover maintenance and other forms of ES provision while addressing smallholder livelihood needs. This has been investigated using ethnographic and PRA methods in two contrasting case studies, Brazil and Nepal. These results will feed into a larger discussion of motivations and potential incentive structures for collective action.

- PECA - Payment of Ecosystem services – Consequenses and Alternatives (2012-2014). In PECA we explored governance, livelihood and social and cultural impacts of payment systems for ecosystem services (in particular REDD) in Brazil, Nepal, Peru and Tanzania. We have then compared these with cases of small-scale use of land/forest which are successful in providing ecosystem services but where no payment is involved.

- In the project AgResources (2012-2015) I focused on ecosystem services in agriculture from a farmer's perspective in a Swedish context and how to plan for ecosystem services in future production systems. 

I give lectures about rural livelihoods system in the Global South, small-scale land use systems, farmers’ management of ecosystem services, research methods etc. in our bachelor and master   programs. Currently I am deputy course coordinator of the Global Food Systems and Food Security course (LU0092, 15 credits) at the Department of Urban and Rural Development (SOL).