Henri Rueff

Background

About Henri Rueff

I evaluate critically farming technologies and innovative payment schemes affecting smallholders’ practices in remote and resource-scarce areas. I investigate the validity of complex human-environment interactions leading to an environment-poverty nexus in the rural sector. I am especially interested in documenting and understanding smallholders' strategies such as income diversification in areas undergoing rapid changes. The effects of changes I explore are mostly environmental (climate change, climate shocks) and institutional (multilevel) using economic models, climate data, and qualitative analysis from first hand data. I spend two to three months per year in the field collecting data and interviewing farmers and nomadic pastoralists in the Gobi desert, the Hindu Kush and Himalaya mountains. More recently, I increasingly focused my research on the extent to which smallholders contribute to regional food security, especially in resource-scarce areas such as desert margins and high altitude rangelands. I constantly seek to bridge the science-policy divide at various scales through generating a holistic understanding of factors that influence negotiation processes among actors.