Prof. John McCarthy
Resources Environment and Development program, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Australia
John McCarthy is a professor of rural development and the anthropology of policy. He has an abiding interest in the rapid socio-environmental change taking place in the Global South. His work focuses on environmental change, rural development, food and livelihood security and the impacts of climate change on the global south. As a scholar of rural development, environmental sociology, and the anthropology of policy, he has concentrated his work on critical issues related to this transition with a focus on the case of Indonesia, converging on three specific themes: Vulnerability and Food Security; Smallholder Development and Rural Change; and Forest and Land Governance.
John McCarthy was previously a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Western Australia and Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has carried out various assignments with aid and development agencies, including AusAID (now DFAT), the World Bank, and the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). He has also published Land & Development in Indonesia: Searching for the People’s Sovereignty (ISAS), The Oil Palm Complex: Smallholders, Agribusiness and the State in Indonesia and Malaysia (NUS) and The Fourth Circle: A Political Ecology of Sumatra’s Rainforest Frontier (Stanford). In 2022 he will publish the book The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia. In 2020 John McCarthy was the country lead for Indonesia on the ACIAR project “Assessment of Food System Security, Resilience and Emerging Risks in the Indo-Pacific in the context of COVID-19”.
