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 relation to environmental governance, climate transitions and rural development across the global North and South. I teach and supervise students at the undergraduate, masters and PhD level and am actively engaged in outreach work both in Sweden and internationally. 

Together with my research group, Rural Developent 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 such as Sami communities in Sweden to emphasize the importance and contribution of rural and indigenous lives in confronting global challenges of sustainability and climate change.

To this end, our group includes a vital 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. 

I work with questions of sustainability and justice in relation to environmental governance, climate transitions and rural development across the global North and South. 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 across in which I work —the contested politics of forest governance, to resource extraction, the work of natural resource bureaucracies, the citizenship implications of the geopolitics of climate programs, rural governance the politics of migration and sustainability in Sweden and climate transitions, I am committed to work for inclusive, reflexive, and socially just knowledge production and action.

A critical subjectivity regarding my own place in the research and questions of research approach are crucial for me. I work with participatory and ethical 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. 

A translocal approach is vital to my work. I analyze rural, environmental, and climate questions through a North–South perspective, using “North–South” not only geographically but analytically. By relating, connecting and comparing places explore how global discourses are articulated in different places and how uneven relations of power, development, and environmental knowledges provide the space or set the limits for transitioning with justice. 

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.