Amber Huff is a social anthropologist and political ecologist. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies where she is a member of the Resource Politics Cluster, and a member of the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia, where her training focused on environmental anthropology.
Her primary areas of focus include politics of conservation, resource struggles and conflict, environmental policy, rural livelihoods and human adaptability and the politics of indigeneity and autochthony within resource struggles in southern Africa. Her recent and ongoing research investigates relationships among environmental policy change and wellbeing at the political and geographic margins, examines the role of land and investment reforms in exacerbating conservation and mining-related conflicts, and considers how dominant discourses of scarcity and security are increasingly entangled with both scientific framings of environmental change and sustainable development policy. She is currently leading projects on governance at the ‘resource nexus’, mining conflicts and natural resource marketisation in southern Africa.
