Photo: made by Jan Meier, ZMT.

kunz[at]kitlv.nl

Kunz, Dr. Yvonne

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Yvonne Kunz is a post-doctoral researcher at KITLV. For the project “Climate Change and Governance in Indonesia and the Caribbean: A Pilot Project on Marine Protected Areas” she investigates whether marine protected areas as a governance tool are capable of keeping pace with climate change as an additional stressor to socio-ecological systems.

Yvonne  is a human geographer by training. She obtained her PhD in 2016 from the University of Goettingen, Germany where she conducted research in a Collaborative Research Center on Ecological and Socio-economic functions on lowland rainforest transformation systems in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. Her interest focused on access to land in the context of expanding monoculture plantations, underlying power asymmetries and resulting injustices often inscribed in the landscape. Her involvement in an transdisciplinary research project in Metro Manila, Philippines as case study, redirected the main attention from the land towards the air while continuing to apply a political ecology lens. Interview partners were jeepeny drivers as main actors in the public transport sector, their perception on air quality as well as their perceptions on governance structures regulating air quality. Understanding how certain regulations are perceived, understood, and translated to a local level reality, guided the field work in Indonesia as well as in the Philippines. Her journey carried on from the Leibniz Center of Tropical Marine Research, where the Philippine project had its home base, to the German Development Institute where she worked as a research analyst to the German Advisory Board on Global Change (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen, WBGU).

Selected Publications

(With Tõnisson*, L., et al), ‘From transfer to knowledge co-production: a transdisciplinary research approach to reduce Black Carbon emissions in Metro Manila’, Philippines. Sustainability 12-3, 2020.

(With Martens, K., Rosyani, Ir., Faust, H.), ‘Environmental governance meets reality: A micro-scale perspective on sustainability certification schemes for oil palm smallholders in Jambi, Sumatra, Society & Natural Resources 33-5: 1-17, 2020.

(With Otten, F. , Mardiana, R. , Martens, K. , Roedel, I. and Heiko Faust), ‘Smallholder telecoupling and climate governance in Jambi Province, Indonesia‘, Social Sciences 8-4: 115, 2019.

(With Hein, J., Faust, H., Mardiana, R.), ‘The transnationalization of competing state projects – carbon offsetting and development in Sumatra’s coastal peat swamp‘, Antipode, 2018.

(With Hein, J.), ‘Adapting in a carbon pool? Politicising climate change at Sumatra’s oil palm frontier’, in: Kleep, S. & L.C. Rodríguez (eds.), Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation: Discourses, Policies and Practices. Routledge, Abingdon, UK and New York, 2018.

(With Steinbach, S., Dittrich, C., Hauser-Schäublin, B., Rosyani Ir., Soetarto, E. & Faust, H.), ‘The fridge in the forest: Historical trajectories of land tenure regulations fostering landscape transformation in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia’, Forest Policy and Economics, 81: 1-9, 2017.

(With Hein, J., Mardiana, R., & Faust, H.), ‘Mimicry of the legal: Translating de jure land formalization processes into de facto local action in Jambi province, Sumatra‘, Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies 9-1: 127-146, 2016.