Democratic Republic of Congo, State-Society relations, Urban Anthropology, Environmental Governance, Sociology
Professor Theodore Trefon is the Vice President of the Academic & Scientific Board of CERIS (since 2016). He has 30+ years of experience as a Congo/Zaire area specialist, specifically in the areas of the political economy of natural resources and environmental governance, state-society relations, social science research methods, urban and rural sociology and aid delivery analysis. He has taught in US, African and European universities and worked as senior researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium for 14 years. He has conducted numerous field-based project evaluations in Central, many of which for USAID. His approach is qualitative, anthropological and embedded in community perceptions of natural resources. Trefon has provided advisory to USAID, the European Commission, CIFOR, UNESCO, CARE, DfID, Wildlife Conservation Society, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the World Bank, the European Court of Auditors, the Dutch Finance Ministry, think tanks and private consultancy firms. Contributing editor to the Review of African Political Economy, he has published numerous books and over 100 scientific papers. Fluent in French and English, he has working knowledge of Lingala. Professor Théodore Trefon was director of the Belgian Reference Centre for Expertise in Central Africa (E-CA – CRE-AC) and headed the contemporary history section of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. He has taught at ERAIFT (Ecole Régionale Post-Universitaire d’Aménagement et de Gestion Intégrés des Forêts et Territoires tropicaux) at the University of Kinshasa. He has also coordinated research on the forest-city interface dimension of the APFT.