Research Interests

Jacob's current research addresses the governance of key environmental challenges:

• Governing biodiversity loss through conservation litigation. Jacob lead the Defra-funded WILDS Project researching the design of environmental lawsuits as a strategy for governing issues such as illegal wildlife trade and deforestation. This work draws on conservation, geography, economics, law and activism. it is being levered to support a lawsuit in Indonesia that will be the first case of its kind globally.

• Governing illegal wildlife trade: Jacob has ongoing resaerch on the diverse interventions used to govern wildlife resources, and especially efforts to reduce illegal wildlife trade. This broad-ranging work includes interviews with people arrested for wildlife crimes in Nepal; assessments of the sustianability of aquarium fish trade in the Philippines, and market-surveys of illegal orchid trade in Southeast Asia. He has a particular interest in wildlife farming, in which threatened species might be farmed to support conservation while providing a legal and sustainable source of wildlife for consumers.

• Governing hydropower through EIAs. Nepal is developing >700 hydropower projects, decisions about which are primarily governed via Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). However, it is an “open secret” that EIAs are rarely implemented with negative socio-environmental outcomes. Funded by the British Council, Jacob and Greenhood Nepal are exploring the EIA governance.

• Governing Indonesian peatland wildfires. Indonesia is suffering fromincreasingly frequent, uncontrolled mega-fire events that yield profound social, environmental and economic burdens. Jacob collaborates in ongoing work on the governance of policy responses to wildlife fires. This includes a current review of the institutional design of 60 different interventions to address wildfires across Indonesia. Jacob and his colalborators are also evaluating the outcomes of a fire prevention programme that has been implemented across 10 villages in Indonesia, to explore how bundles of interventions shape fire outcomes.

PhD Supervision Interests

• Conservation rule breaking • Governance of wildlife trade and illegal resource access • Conservation law and criminology • Social and policy dimensions of Indonesian peatland fires and haze • How ecosystem service concepts/valuation are understood and used by policy makers, prosecutors and judges