I'm beginning a multli-year research project on the permaculture movement. These are my central questions:

1. Extent. How big is the network? How many have been trained, how many centers, how many are active?

2. Social Impacts. What happens to people after they take a course, or participate in a development project? How are their life-choices affected? Perhaps most importantly, how is their livelihood affected? How does this change 1 year, 5 years, 10 years down the line?

3. Ecological Impacts. What happens to land that is impacted by permaculturists? What are the changes in land use and land cover over time on permaculture sites? Is this different for client sites, development sites, and institutes/centers? How can we characterize permaculture's effects on ecosystem health and productivity?

4. Relationship with contemporary debates in ecology, agroecology, and political ecology. Permaculture was founded on the science of the 1970s and 1980s. Has the movement kept up with - or predicted - advances in earth system and ecosystem science? What about advances in agroecology and agroforestry - are movement practices and claims corroborated or disputed by contemporary 'whole systems' science? I'll also be looking at political ecology - especially narratives of how change happens. For instance, on this very website permaculturists use the story about the Desertification Crisis as a justification for pc. This is an very old, very well-funded, but thoroughly debunked story - that is used frequently to justify top-down, counterproductive, and very un-permaculture restrictions on villagers and herders.

I'm looking for collaborators on all the inhabited continents. Get in touch!