Elaine Marshall

Elaine is a PhD researcher in Botany, with 25 years of international experience managing collaborative relationships for applied research, development and policy impacts across the natural resource, rural livelihoods and health sectors. She has worked primarily in Latin America and West Africa, in community-based resource management and governance, NTFPs, poverty alleviation, and gender empowerment. More recent work on farmer-led interventions for integrating nature ‘on farm’, led her towards her PhD journey, on which she explores gendered perspectives of nature restoration in the Global South. Now in her final year, she has applied a feminist political ecology lens to evaluate how ecosystem restoration delivers gender equality benefits across a portfolio of UNDP projects, and has undertaken community field work in Ghana, and also remotely in Burkina Faso. She believes that making progress on biodiversity and sustainable development ambitions relies not only on the effective engagement of local communities in all levels of decision-making, but that within these communities the specific empowerment of women is key to unlocking the full potential of Nature-based Solutions.