I am the Director of the Sheffield Institute for International Development (), at the University of Sheffield. I trained as an anthropologist at UCL, where I wrote my PhD under Kathy Homewood’s supervision. I then worked at the Geography Departments of the Universities of Cambridge (on a post-doc with Bill Adams) and Oxford before moving to Manchester (at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, now Global Development Institute) in 2005 and then Sheffield in 2015.
Most of my research has been in Tanzania, where I have worked on livelihood change, natural resource governance, microfinance and institutional performance. But I have also worked in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India. My broader interests include work on global overviews of the social impacts of protected areas, media and conservation, sectoral studies of NGOs and development data. I have also worked on celebrity and development, based largely on research in the UK.