Cambridge’s engagement with African, South Asian, and Latin American studies has a historical legacy stretching back to the early twentieth century, with three Area Studies Centres formally established in the 1960s to bring together expertise from across the University’s departments and faculties.

The Consortium, anchored in the Area Studies Centres in collaboration with Gender Studies and Development Studies within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, brings together scholars and students of different regions and disciplines from across the University and an expansive network of visiting fellows — all seeking to address the major challenges facing the planet and its peoples today, and to locate these challenges in history. 

The Consortium sets out critical new research and impact agendas and enables Cambridge to stay at the forefront of genuinely global knowledge and engagement.  

Now, a proposed research programme, ‘Sociobioeconomics of West Africa and the Amazon’, will pioneer a blueprint for the scalability of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in two tropical forest ecosystems, the Amazonian and Guinean. 

Led by Professor Rachael Garrett, the Moran Professor of Conservation and Development, this project will incorporate fieldwork and build on strong international databases to identify which configurations of NbS align with local community preferences, national and international conservation pledges, and the social and economic support systems they require to sustain over time. 

Professor Garrett’s research examines the drivers and impacts of land change, primarily in forest landscapes, and the effectiveness and equity of forest conservation and sustainable agriculture policies and practices. She works closely with farmers and national agriculture and forestry agencies in research spanning Brazil, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Switzerland, and the Republic of Georgia.