Dr Callie Berman

Callie Berman is a second year PhD student in the Centre for Development Studies in the University of Cambridge. Her research interests explore the notion of sustainability – how it is conceptualised, discussed and practiced – and how this produces various environmental development initiatives and natural resource governance systems. She looks at how understandings of sustainability come to be embedded in institutional regimes. Interpretations of natural resources, alongside the knowledge systems that inform them, change over time and space, interact with institutional memory, and affect present day resource use and management. Her research simultaneously analyses changes and varieties of the human-environment relationship since moments of political change clarify and bring forth social features. Specifically, her work situates the human-environment question in Central Asia, a region that has undergone comprehensive systemic changes since 1991. In order to unpack the nature of the human-environment relationship, she uses caviar to examine how a resource is valued to then consider the dynamics of those values within and between the Caspian littoral states of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Ultimately, these pursuits have a two-pronged aim: to move beyond the global discourse of sustainability to offer a more localised insight into what sustainability means for transitioning Central Asian societies; as well as to contribute to understandings of Central Asia from the vantage of the human-environment relationship.