Emily Sigman
Global cocoa stories (2020)
The cocoa value chain is laden with several severe and interconnected problems, including environmental degradation, climate change vulnerability, widespread blight and disease, unfair trade, and labor rights abuses. Many interventions are actively underway to try to assuage these compounding issues, yet current cocoa dynamics remain discouraging. This study draws out personal, human stories from across the globe in order to bring to light certain themes that have followed chocolate from its biogeographic origins in South America all the way through to its present day iterations across the globe. It focuses in particular on the understudied relationship between cocoa and state power, and explores how this dynamic reverberates through communities and shapes the individual lives of those who animate the cocoa value chain.
Who Does Restoration, and Why? Documenting and Understanding Ethiopia's Free Labour Contribution Period (2018)
Every year, in select locations across Ethiopia–particularly in Tigray–an event known as the Free Labour Contribution Period (FLCP) takes place. The FLCP typically lasts for a minimum of 20 days, and sometimes much longer, during which time community members volunteer substantial hours of heavy labor on a wide variety of large-scale landscape restoration projects. International organizations, as well as national directives, often rely on this labor to implement programs, many of which concern Ethiopia's 15 Million-hectare Bonn Challenge commitment. Despite the centrality of the FLCP to the dynamics of landscape restoration, strikingly little scholarship exists exploring its origins, current manifestations, or future prospects. This research project explores the FLCP through the lens of political ecology, focusing on one community in Tigray (Abreha we Atsbeha) that is well known for its restoration efforts and successes. Using immersive methods including participant observation, in-depth interviewing, and participation in the FLCP, this project produced a detailed rendering of the complex local-level social and political hierarchies that govern and organize the FLCP. This information can be used by researchers and organizations to better understand how national and international restoration projects impact and are impacted by local political dynamics. It can also be used to improve monitoring and evaluation efforts, highlighting key social strata and groups for sampling participant data in order to better represents a heterogeneous local population. In addition to blog posts, photo essays, conference and colloquium presentations, and a pending journal article, this research also contributed to a report submitted to the World Agroforestry Centre to enable replication and integration of such research in other locations across Ethiopia. (2018)