Diana Suhardiman is director of KITLV and endowed professor of Natural Resource Governance, Climate and Equity at Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. In this role she will further strengthen the research programme on climate governance, studying how climate adaptation is entangled with every day’s livelihoods and linked with processes of agrarian change and globalization, while contributing to decolonizing climate debates and climate justice. 

Putting power and politics central in the contemporary struggles of natural resource governance, her most recent research looks at grassroots climate governance in Southeast Asia, where she focuses on the politics of knowledge (re)production, cultural (dis)continuity, and agency shaping in distinct yet interrelated socio-ecological systems: 1)upland cultivation in Laos; 2) irrigated agriculture in Indonesia; 3) forest conservation in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands; and 4) sea nomads’ fishing territories in the Philippines. Tracing evolutionary pathways in grassroots climate adaptation practices, this research looks at various forms of knowledge systems including different ways of knowing embedded in lived experience, memories, and the arts, entangled in multiple overlapping governing networks and livelihood pathways. 

Suhardiman studied Tropical Land Use at Wageningen University (1998) and obtained her PhD in Social Science from the same university (2008). Between 2016-2021, she was Research Group Lead Governance and Inclusion at the International Water Management Institute, based in Vientiane, Laos, where she also worked as post-doctoral fellow and later (senior) researcher since 2008. 

She is the author of more than 85 publications, mostly journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes and monographs on the politics of exclusion, power struggles, and agency shaping in natural resource governance in Southeast Asia.

Selected Publications

Suhardiman, Diana, 'Water and hydropower', in: Creek, S., High, H., Tappe, O (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Laos. London: Routledge, 2026.

Suhardiman, Diana  & Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Isabel Lambrecht, Frank Place, Uchendu Eugene Chigbu and Iliana Monterroso, 'Expanding tenure horizons in food policy research', Food Policy 137, 2025.

Suhardiman, Diana & Chaya Vaddhanaphuti, Saw Sha Bwe Moo and Saw Paul Sein Twa, ‘Firebreaks as indigenous knowledge system and cultural practice: An emerging counternarrative in forest fire governance’, World Development 198, 2025.

Suhardiman, Diana & Ward Berenschot, Dianto Bachriadi, Bayu Dardias Kurniadi, Hilma Safitri and Rizki Maulana Hakim, 'Dispossession by archive: Contemporary land grabbing through colonial land deeds in Indonesia', Journal of Peasant Studies, 2025. 

Suhardiman, Diana & Wengki Ariando, Dedi Adhuri and Terry Indrabudi, 'Bakelam: Sea nomads’ knowledge systems and potential building block for living with change', Political Geography 119, 2025.

Suhardiman, Diana & Charlotte Clare and Saw Naw Kaw, 'A Karen indigenous approach to food sovereignty: Tracing processes of institutional emergence', Geoforum 159, 2025.

Suhardiman, Diana & Jonathan Rigg and Melissa Marschke, ‘Rethinking enviromental governance: Broadening the scope, deepening the perspectives’, Leiden University Press, 2025

Suhardiman, Diana &  Anna-Maria Lampe and Anthony Gueguen, 'Inter-village land conflicts in Laos’ upland frontiers: From state territorialization to powers of exclusion', Geoforum 150, 2024.

Suhardiman, Diana & Anna-Maria Lampe, Anthony Gueguen and Jonathan Rigg, ‘Silent transition: Commercialization and changing customary land tenure systems in upland Laos’, Land Use Policy 126, 2023. 

Suhardiman, Diana & Jonas Kramp, ‘(Un)making the upland: Resettlement, rubber and land use planning in Namai village, Laos’, Journal of Peasant Studies 49-1, pp. 78-100, 2022.  

Suhardiman, Diana, Natalia Scurrah, ‘Institutional bricolage and the (re)shaping of communal land tenure arrangements: Two contrasting cases in upland and lowland Northeastern Laos’, World Development 147, 2021.   

Suhardiman, Diana & Natalia Scurrah, ‘Farmer’s agency and institutional bricolage in land use plan implementation in upland Laos’, Land Use Policy 104, 2021.  

Suhardiman, Diana & Jonathan Rigg, ‘Aspirations undone: Hydropower and the (re)shaping of livelihood pathways in Northern Laos’, Agriculture and Human Values 38-4, pp. 963-969, 2021.  

Suhardiman, Diana, Ayemyaing Nawaye & Natalia Scurrah, ‘Scalar politics, power struggles and institutional emergence in Daw Lar Lake, Myanmar’, Journal of Rural Studies 87, pp. 32-44, 2021.  

Suhardiman, Diana, Jessica DiCarlo, Oulavanh Keovilignavong, Jonathan Rigg & Alan Nicol, ‘(Re)constructing state power and livelihoods through the Laos-China Railway project’, Geoforum 124, pp. 79-88, 2021.  

Suhardiman, Diana, Saw John Bright & Casper Palmano, ‘The politics of legal pluralism in the shaping of spatial power in Myanmar’s land governance’, Journal of Peasant Studies 48-2, pp. 411-435, 2021. 

Suhardiman, Diana, Jonathan Rigg, Marcel Bandur, Melissa Marschke, Michelle Miller, Noudsavanh Pheuangsavanh, Mayvong Sayatham & David Taylor, ‘On the coattails of globalization: COVID-19, migrants and migration in Asia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47-1, pp. 88-109, 2021.