Associate Professor
Research and teaching on environmental issues, indigenous peoples, conservation, political ecology, cultural ecology, environmental history, and protected areas.
My research over the past twenty years has explored society/nature interaction by integrating conceptual and methodological approaches from political ecology, cultural ecology, and environmental history in (post)colonially-informed, collaborative fieldwork with Sharwas (Sherpas) and other indigenous peoples. I am particularly concerned with documenting and supporting indigenous peoples' land use, commons management, conservation values and practices, and struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. One focus of my work has been analysis of how indigenous peoples have adapted to, resisted, and negotiated nationalization and globalization processes and the ramifications this has had for their self determination, livelihoods, and homelands. My concerns include illuminating the processes and impacts of state, imperial, and transnational control of territory and resources, national and global economic integration (including tourism development), and imposed state and international conservation discourses, institutions, and policies. This has involved me in advocacy for community and regional empowerment, including community-based conservation and efforts by communities, government agencies, NGOs, INGOs, and multilateral organizations to create new kinds of protected areas which are inhabited, authorized, and managed by Indigenous peoples - what I call (post)colonial protected areas. I continue also to be concerned with the study of the consequences for people, landscapes, and ecosystems of changing local and regional control of territory, land use practices, conservation values, and “natural resources” and commons management practices.
My fieldwork has focused primarily on Nepal, where I have worked extensively in the Chomolungma (Mt. Everest/Sagarmatha) region with Sharwas (Sherpas) and other peoples who inhabit Sagarmatha National Park, the national park buffer zone, and other nearby regions. My research there has been based on (post)colonially-informed ethnographic, collaborative fieldwork with more than thirty Sharwa co-researchers. These projects have taken me to the Chomolungma region 32 times during the past 26 years to carry out more than five years of fieldwork. My Sharwa associates and I have been working in more than 70 Sharwa villages in four Sharwa-defined regions in northern Solukhumbu District in which Sharwa land use spans an altitudinal range from 2,000 to 6,000 meters. During the 1980s we focused particularly on the high-altitude homeland of the Khumbu Sharwas, and since then have extended work down the Khumbi Tsangbu (Dudh Kosi) valley into the territories of the Pharak, Kathuthanga, and Manidingma Sharwas. Our research topics have included all aspects of regional land use (agriculture, pastoralism, forest use, tourism development) and many aspects of economic, social, cultural, and environmental change. Areas of particular, longstanding interest have been local narratives of environmental history and discourses on ethnicity, indigeneity, conservation, and development; local environmental and land use knowledge and values; the political ecology of forest use, management, change, and conservation; community and regional Sharwa management of forest and rangeland commons; tourism development and impacts; and protected area management goals, policies, and practices. The work has been supported by four Fulbright research fellowships, two research fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, and funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration as well as grants from the University of California, Berkeley and a year as a fellow at the Environment and Policy Institute at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
I have also gained comparative perspectives from fieldwork in the Gurung homelands of the Annapurna Conservation Area, exploratory work on indigenous peoples and protected areas in the US in Hawaii, California, and Arizona, and from travels in protected areas and indigenous homelands in the mountains and highlands of India, Pakistan, China (Tibet, Qinghai, Yunnan, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang), Peru, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Switzerland, Alaska, the U.S. West, and Canada.
In addition to my continuing Himalayan fieldwork, I am involved in examining indigenous rights and conservation issues globally, particularly in connection with land use, resource management, and protected area planning and management. I have been a member since 1991 of the World Commission on Protected Areas of IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, also known as the World Conservation Union), some members of which have for some years promoted greater recognition of indigenous rights and the adoption of a new protected area paradigm. I am also a member of CEESP and two inter-commission themes: TILCEPA and TGER.
My current projects include continuing fieldwork in the Chomolungma region and research on new global protected area approaches. I am the author of Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya (University of California Press 1993) and the editor and primary author of Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas (Island Press 1997). I have also contributed chapters to edited books and articles to The Geographical Journal , The Geographical Review , and the Journal of Cultural Geography . I am currently working on new books on the political ecology of conservation in the Chomolungma region and on new paradigm protected areas.
Representative Publications:
Howitt, R. and Stevens, S. 2004. "Cross-Cultural Research: Ethics, Methods and Relationships" in Hay, I. (ed). Qualitative Methods in Human Geography , 2nd ed. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
"Struggles Over Forests: Sharwas (Sherpas), Contestation and Conservation in the Chomolungma ( Mt. Everest) Region of Nepal," forthcoming in Michael Steinberg ed Forests, Fields, and Fallows: Contested Resources in Politicized Indigenous Landscapes University of Texas Press, Austin.
"Tourism and Deforestation in the Mt Everest Region," 2003. Geographical Journal, Vol. 169, No. 3, pp. 255-277.
"Fieldwork as Commitment," 2001 Geographical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1-2, pp. 66-73.
Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya 1993 ( University of California Press, Berkeley).
Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas , editor 1997 (Island Press, Washington, D.C
"Introduction" in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas , ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 1-7.
"The Legacy of Yellowstone," in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas, ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 13-32.
"New Alliances for Conservation," in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas , ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 33-62.
"Consultation, Co-management, and Conflict in Sagarmatha ( Mount Everest) National Park, Nepal," in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas , ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 63-97.
" Annapurna Conservation Area: Empowerment, Conservation, and Development in Nepal," in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas , ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 237-261.
"Lessons and Directions" in S. Stevens, editor, 1997. Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas, ( Island Press, Washington, D.C.), pp. 265-298.
"Tourism, Change, and Continuity in the Mount Everest Region of Nepal," 1993. Geographical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 410-427
"Sherpas, Tourism, and Cultural Change in Nepal's Mount Everest Region," 1991. Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 41-60.
Courses: