Research
My research examines how global economic, political and societal transformations interact with changing material and ecological conditions, acquire regionally specific forms, and shape possibilities and constraints for development.
Amazonia has been the principal empirical setting of this work for more than three decades. My current research engages social systems theory and research on world society in dialogue with critical political economy and regional development studies, alongside empirical research on resource extraction, society–nature relations and climate governance, extractive communities, public policy and regional transformation.
Current Research Programme
Regional Development in World Society
My current theoretical research focuses on developing a theory of regional development in world society. It asks how globally operating societal processes become selectively connected within particular regional contexts and why these connections generate highly differentiated regional configurations rather than uniform territorial outcomes.
The programme approaches regions as historically contingent configurations in which heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed. Particular attention is given to organizations, knowledge, institutionalized expectations, material and ecological conditions, and to the processes through which world-societal connections become regionally consequential.
The central question is how such configurations shape different capacities, dependencies, inequalities and possibilities for regional development.
Theoretical Foundations
My research draws primarily on social systems theory and research on world society, while remaining in dialogue with critical political economy and regional development theory. Together, these perspectives provide resources for examining how world-societal processes become connected to historically evolving regional configurations, how uneven structures and dependencies emerge, and what these processes mean for the possibilities and constraints of regional development.
Social Systems Theory & World Society · Critical Political Economy · Regional Development Theory
Research Fields
These interconnected research fields examine different mechanisms through which world-societal processes become regionally consequential and contribute to the continuing development of the theoretical framework.
Mining & Extractive Transformations
Mining and mineral-resource extraction constitute the longest-running empirical field of my research. The work examines how artisanal and industrial mining, global resource markets, resource governance and changing mineral demand contribute to the transformation of regional configurations.
Society–Nature & Climate
Research examines how ecological and material conditions become socially consequential through observation, knowledge production, measurement, valuation, regulation and organization, with increasing attention to climate governance and its differentiated regional consequences.
Extractive Communities & Territorial Relations
Research on extractive reserves and resource-dependent communities examines how populations, resources, livelihoods and organizations become connected to markets, public policies and changing forms of resource and environmental governance, generating differentiated forms of participation, capacity, dependency and inequality.
Policy, Evaluation & Applied Research
Research on public policy and applied research examines how knowledge, political decisions, planning and organizational capacities become connected in organized attempts to influence regional transformation and why such interventions generate differentiated and often unintended consequences.
Amazonia as a Comparative Observation Field
Amazonia has been the principal regional focus of my academic work for more than three decades. Early research concerned regional development and the Zona Franca de Manaus and subsequently expanded to gold mining, industrial resource extraction, public policy, sustainable development, extractive reserves and regional governance.
Over time, Amazonia became more than a geographical focus of empirical research. I increasingly approach it as a comparative observation field containing heterogeneous regional configurations through which transformations of world society acquire specific regional forms.
This perspective connects locally observable processes — from mining expansion and environmental regulation to climate governance and changing value chains — with broader transformations in world society.
Amazonia is therefore not treated as a separate thematic research field, but as a comparative empirical observation field across the different domains of my research.
Research Development
My research has developed around a persistent interest in regional development, particularly in Amazonia. Rather than following a linear succession of research topics, the programme has evolved through several overlapping and increasingly interconnected lines of inquiry.
Early research examined regional development through resource extraction and economic transformation, initially focusing on the Zona Franca de Manaus and subsequently on gold mining and the social, economic and environmental consequences of mineral extraction in Amazonia. From the late 1990s onward, these empirical questions became increasingly connected to theoretical questions concerning society, globalization and the limits of political intervention, particularly through social systems theory.
Research on public policy, governance and organizations, transnational resource governance and society–nature relations subsequently broadened this perspective. These strands examined the institutional and organizational conditions of regional intervention, the connections between regional transformations and transnational markets and governance arrangements, and the changing societal relevance of environmental conditions and global environmental change.
These lines of inquiry increasingly converge in the current research programme Regional Development in World Society. RWS draws on research problems and empirical observations generated through these earlier fields and seeks to develop a common theoretical framework for understanding how heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected and consequential within historically evolving regional configurations.
Research development at a glance
| PERSISTENT RESEARCH PROBLEM | |||
| Regional Development | |||
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| EMPIRICAL RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES | |||
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| ↕ | |||
| Increasing interconnection of empirical and theoretical research problems | |||
| ↕ | |||
| THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT | |||
| Social Systems Theory · World Society Critical Political Economy · Regional Development | |||
| ↓ | |||
| REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN WORLD SOCIETY | |||
| Current theoretical framework and theory-development programme |
Across these research trajectories, a persistent question provides continuity:
How do global transformations acquire regionally specific forms, and how do the resulting configurations shape the possibilities and limits of development?