James Langston
James was born in northern England, raised in mid-Atlantic USA, and moved to FNQ Australia to pursue his Masters and PhD in 2011. He then moved to Vancouver Canada where he managed (and lectured) the professional Masters of International Forestry program at the University of British Columbia, he moved back to Australia to join CSIRO in March, 2023. He discovered his passion for transdisciplinary research late in his bachelors degree, while studying in Tanzania. He has a broad-based interdisciplinary background and works on the interconnected issues that shape development trajectories in landscapes, mainly tropical. He is interested in governance, learning, and how change happens. He has explored ways of achieving ‘embedded science’ in high-stakes forest landscapes where people, nature, and their institutions are going through transition. He is leading advancements in an emerging field of Landscape Transition Science. He currently co-leads research on Sustainable Lakes Management in Indonesia, while co-developing a roadmap and the institutions necessary for transformative peatland restoration. His PhD centred on a practical political ecology of spatial development initiatives in Indonesia; he build on that work in CSIRO with the Landscape and Forest Function Team. He maintains transdisciplinary partnerships in across Australia, Indonesia, the Mekong region, the Congo Basin, and most recently in British Columbia. His past and present commitments are born of a desire to stimulate more just learning mechanisms that influence discourses on desirable future landscapes, and the decision-making systems that shape their benefits. James enjoys to read widely, likens sustainable development to jazz, and enjoys the fruits of being academically ill-disciplined.
Abstracts this author is presenting: