People

Juliet Lu is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management with a focus on political ecology. She is advised by Dr. Nancy Lee Peluso and is a member of the Land Lab and the Graduate Student Association.

She worked from 2009-2011 at the World Agroforestry Centre in Yunnan, China and from 2012-2013 with the Centre for Development and Environment in Vientiane, Laos. During that time, she studied communal forest management, the Grain for Green Program, and agroforestry initiatives in Southwest China. She also contributed to launching the LaoDECIDE info Project, a database of foreign land investments in Laos, and co-authored a report on its central findings (see link to Schönweger et al. 2012 below).

Juliet's doctoral project examines the political economy of Chinese agribusiness companies’ investments in Laos – primarily in rubber plantations.  Her broader research interests involve: the impacts of China’s growing demand for raw materials on land and resource management in Southeast Asia, the politics of resource governance and state formation in borderland regions, the rise of Chinese development cooperation initiatives, and discourses of environmental protection and sustainable development in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative.