YUSTINA OCTIFANNY

PhD Student

Research Title: Actor, Politic, and Governance of Indonesia's Peatland
Research Group: Tropical Environmental Change (TEC)
Thesis Advisor: Prof David Taylor

Yustina Octifanny or Fanny (she/her) studies the human-land nexus specializing in political ecology, spatial inequality, migration, land transformation, livelihood, urbanization, and informality. Fanny is also a professional urban and regional planner by education and training.

For her doctoral research, she is interested in investigating the challenges and barriers to nature-based carbon governance by exploring different actors' interests and levels of influence over Indonesia's peatland and extended ecosystem. She also studies how local communities living on peatland experience disproportionate burdens due to actors' interests and influences. Fanny is interested in understanding growing and shrinking manoeuvering spaces for the peatland-related actors who represent these categories: the intergovernmental organizations, national and local governments, civil society organizations, global private philanthropies, voluntary carbon market actors, impact investors, conventional private actors, and local communities.

Before coming to NUS, Fanny was a peatland researcher for EU-funded Sustainable Use of Peatland and Haze Mitigation in ASEAN Component 2 (SUPA C2) under the administration of the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, a member of the People for Peat Coalition. Before her doctoral school, Fanny was also a researcher and evaluator at Dala Institute in Indonesia, where she worked on research, technical assistance, evaluation, and learning for the intersection of nature-society studies and consultation services.

Fanny holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and a Bachelor of Science from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia.