• Function: Senior Policy Advisor
• Company: Forest Peoples Programme

Marcus Colchester has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford and has spent 45 years working with forest peoples all around the tropics and in the taiga. He was Founder-Director and now Senior Policy Advisor of the international human rights organisation, the Forest Peoples Programme. Since 1980 he has researched and advocated on the impacts of imposed development and conservation on indigenous peoples. He has

published widely on these subjects including Salvaging Nature: indigenous peoples, protected areas and biodiversity conservation and various volumes on the political ecology of forest peoples in Sarawak, Guyana, Suriname and Indonesia, as well as in academic and popular journals.

 

In recognition of his work he has been awarded a Pew Conservation Fellowship, the RAI’s Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology and an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University. He is a member of the IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy, and is social NGO representation on the Board of Governors of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and the Board of Directors of the Forest Stewardship

Council. He is a long-term Steering Group member of the Yale University-based The Forests Dialogue (TFD).