Over the past 30 years, Chris Bennett has worked mostly in Indonesia, also in other Asian, African and Central American countries, on natural resource governance with a special focus on forestry and agroforestry and their relationship to water resources.
His analytical work has covered the root causes of unsustainable development, specifically, uncertainty of land access, undervaluation of natural resources and under-regulation of negative neighborhood effects. Much of his work has centered on land-access certainty that incentivizes investments by local and customary smallholders, rural communities and the private sector in renewable natural resources, and on how such land and business certainty harnesses human, social and knowledge assets among local and customary communities for increased land productivity with positive downstream effects, e.g., economic community-based agroforestry providing downstream water resource protection benefits recognized by certification.
