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Student Spotlight: Lindsey Fransen
Student Spotlight Directory
ERG Master's candidate, Lindsey Fransen. |
A community leader in Michoacan points out the mark on a tree trunk showing that it was legally harvested as part of the community's forestry plan. |
"Common Resources, Private Benefits?"
Lindsey Fransen is a second year Master’s student in the Energy & Resources Group. Her research centers around policy approaches to natural resource management challenges, especially where vulnerable resources overlap with vulnerable communities.
For her master’s project, Lindsey is researching the economic, social, and ecological impacts of decentralization of management in Mexico’s community forests. Over half of Mexico’s forests are owned by communities, many of which run Community Forest Enterprises (CFEs) to harvest and sell their timber. For most of their history, CFEs were required to manage all forestry activities and timber profits through the community government, but a recent reform allows community members to form work groups or work individually to harvest timber on communal land. While the reform opens up opportunities for improvement in CFE operation, it also changes the management of forestry profits, raising concern that investments in public goods like roads and schools will be neglected, or that some community members will not be able to benefit from the communal resource.
Lindsey’s research investigates why and how communities decided to alter the form of CFE operation and how the change has affected the livelihoods of community members. She spent the summer of 2007 in five forest communities in the states of Michoacán and Durango, conducting interviews with community members and forestry officials to learn what drove decisions to change CFE operation, and how different types of decentralization affect different individuals within each community.
Forest communities in Durango collect tree limbs after harvest and arrange them on slopes to prevent erosion.
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The Real River in Portugal, badly degraded and in need of restoration. |
In addition to her research on Mexican community forestry, Lindsey also works on water resource management both here in California and internationally. She holds an internship with the California Public Utilities Commission, working in the Water Branch of the Division of Ratepayer Advocates to promote water conservation within private water utilities and to ensure that low-income consumers have affordable access to sufficient water to meet basic needs. She also participated in a project last summer with the Mediterranean Climate Landscape class, helping municipalities in the Real River basin of Portugal implement an EU-wide watershed management directive.
Lindsey received a BA in Earth & Environmental Sciences from Wesleyan University in 2001. She spent the following year on a Watson Fellowship studying sustainability in agriculture in Bolivia, Jamaica, Uganda, and Thailand. Before coming to ERG, Lindsey was an Associate with the World Resources Institute, where she worked with international teams to conduct research and engage governments and local stakeholders in dialogues on natural resource management, agricultural biotechnology, and globalization in Southeast Asia. Lindsey came to ERG because it was a place where she could continue to work on these issues from different perspectives, and also challenge herself to stretch her mind, gain new skills, and explore new areas.
Lindsey’s studies at ERG are supported by an ERG Block Grant, the Tinker Foundation, and a COR grant.
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