Camilla Toulmin

Camilla Toulmin, Senior Associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and former Director 2003-15, has forty years work experience in research and policy analysis, focused on different African livelihood systems. She has recently been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and appointed Professor in Practice at the University of Lancaster’s Environment Centre (LEC).

An economist by training, she has recently finished a longitudinal study of village life in central Mali, documenting environmental, economic, demographic and land use change in the sites where she carried out her fieldwork 1980-82. This research will be published in late 2019 by Oxford University Press as Land, Investment and Migration: Thirty-five years of village life in Mali.

She is currently working as an Associate with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and their recently formed Commission on Global Economic Transformation. Co-chaired by Professors Joe Stiglitz and Michael Spence, the CGET aims to address the most challenging economic issues of our time, and explore bold and creative solutions to them. Camilla is helping shape the African dimensions of CGET’s work, drawing upon African expertise and anchoring the analysis within African centres of excellence, to investigate the consequences of rapid demographic growth in the context of disruptions from technological transformations, premature de-industrialization, conflict, climate impacts and weak governance. Her book Climate Change in Africa (2009) Zed Books, provides a clear statement of the diverse challenges and opportunities which climate change brings to the African continent, and the need to disentangle how trends in climate intersect with a range of other forces at play.