Professor Andreas Neef is Dean (Research) for the Arts, Education and Law Group and a Professor of Global Development. Originally from Germany, he spent the past 25 years of his academic career in Thailand, Japan and New Zealand before joining Griffith University in May 2024. Most of his recent and current research focuses on countries in the Global South, primarily in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
We asked Andreas about his research path and his advice for researchers just starting out.
What path led you to becoming a researcher?
At the end of my graduate studies in agricultural economics, rural sociology and rural development policy, I was fortunate to be awarded a philanthropic scholarship to conduct a three-month fieldwork for my master’s thesis in the Republic of Yemen. Learning about the unique Yemeni ways of doing dryland farming on steep-slope terraces that had been intricately built over centuries was a fascinating experience.
Image courtesy of Professor Andreas Neef.
I then had the opportunity to spend two years in the West African countries Benin and Niger where I conducted research on customary land rights in remote rural communities for my PhD project. I wanted to understand how people’s access to land and other natural resources is shaped by a combination of cultural norms and capitalist influences. In one of the communities that I studied, women had lost their land rights through the interventions of a foreign development project. This led to my deep interest in global land and resource grabbing and the various practices of dispossession and displacement associated with this phenomenon. I continue to investigate how governments and corporations in the agro-industrial, mining and tourism sectors deprive Indigenous communities of their land rights which are often informal and unregistered and therefore hard to defend against capitalist forces and elite interests. Together with local activist researchers and human rights advocates, I try to understand how communities can successfully resist land grabbing and displacement from their ancestral territories.
Can you tell us a bit about the projects you are currently working on, or have recently worked on?
More recently, I have become interested in issues of climate-related migration and climate mobility justice. I work with Samoan and Fijian colleagues from the National University of Samoa and the University of the South Pacific on a project that looks into local micro-mobility strategies which enable families and communities in coastal areas to remain on their ancestral land, despite increasing threats from sea-level rise, cyclones and floods. For example, in Samoa, the cultural practice of fa’a-‘āigalua (literally meaning ‘to be with two families’ or ‘having two or more residences or families’) enables individuals to move flexibly and spontaneously between two households or homes during times of crisis and disaster. We believe that such community-based strategies can be viable alternatives to government-led planned relocation projects. Our project – which is funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research in Japan – has a strong capacity-building component, as we intend to help policy makers finetune or overhaul local and national climate mobility plans, climate displacement frameworks and planned relocation guidelines.
What sparked your passion for this research area?
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, I led two collaborative research projects that examined how disaster-affected communities in Thailand, Cambodia, Fiji and Japan recovered from crisis and adapted to recurring disaster events. In Fiji, we worked with communities that had gone through a series of climate-related disasters, including floods, cyclones and droughts, within a period of ten years. One community in which 17 houses collapsed into a flooded river was relocated with assistance from Australian Aid, Habitat for Humanity and the Fijian government. We found that while they were now safe from flood-related disasters, they lived far away from the river and ocean that had provided for their livelihoods prior to relocation. Consequently, they felt a strong sense of loss and place detachment and many of them lived on benefits. This triggered our research team’s interest in identifying community-based alternatives to planned relocation.
Do you have any advice for researchers just starting out?
‘Be courageous to explore fields and go to places that nobody else has examined before you.’
One frequent problem that I have observed with novice researchers is that they tend to ask research questions which are easy to answer or for which they already know the answers and then use the research simply to confirm their prior assumptions. My advice to early-career researchers is to choose topics and research questions that are multi-layered and have the potential to produce surprising and counterintuitive findings. Be courageous to explore fields and go to places that nobody else has examined before you.
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