Research

  • Climate Change Governance

    My work examines the international environmental policies formulated to manage deforestation in the aim of mitigating climate change in the Global South. Specifically, I focus on Guyana and Suriname and the climate impacting activities taking place there.

  • Colonialism

    Given colonialism’s formative role in the creation of Guyana and Suriname and in giving rise to the environmental challenges faced by human beings all over the world today, my work explores the continuities between colonialism and climate change, especially around land use practices in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  • Environmental Conservation

    My work on environmental conservation and international development explores how countries in the Global South are balancing their desire for development with environmental conservation in the time of escalating and overlapping biodiversity and climate crises.

Publications

Books

Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield, Collins, Y. A., March 2024, University of California Press

Journal Articles

A Political Ecology of Atmospheres, Collins, Y. A., December 2023, In: Political Geography

Governance and Conservation Effectiveness in Protected Areas and Indigenous and Locally Managed Areas, Zhang, Y., Collins, Y. A. et al, November 2023, In: Annual Review of Environment and Resources

Guyana in the eye of the storm in 2021: convergence, stasis and reverberation, Collins, Y. A., 7 Jul 2022, In: Revista de Ciencia Politica. Ahead of print, 22 p.

"Ocean Optimism" and resilience: learning from women's responses to disruptions caused by COVID-19 to small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of Guinea, Okafor-Yarwood, I., van den Berg, S., Collins, Y. A. & Sefa-Nyarko, C., 22 Jun 2022, In: Frontiers in Marine Science. 9, 16 p., 862780.

Plotting the coloniality of conservation, Collins, Y. A., Macguire-Rajpaul, V., Krauss, J. E., Asiyanbi, A., Jiménez, A., Bukhi Mabele, M. & Alexander-Owen, M., 13 Nov 2021, In: Journal of Political Ecology. 28, 1

Racing climate change in Guyana and Suriname, Collins, Y. A., 2 Sep 2021, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Politics. OnlineFirst, 15 p.

The extractive embrace: shifting expectations of conservation and extraction in the Guiana Shield, Collins, Y. A., 27 Aug 2021, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Environmental Politics. Latest Articles, 23 p.

How REDD+ governs: Multiple forest environmentalities in Guyana and Suriname, Collins, Y. A., 1 Jun 2020, In: Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 3, 2, p. 1-23

Colonial residue: REDD+, territorialisation and the racialized subject in Guyana and Suriname, Collins, Y. A., Nov 2019, In: Geoforum. 106, p. 38-47

Other Contributions to Academic Journals

Book Review - The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism, Collins, Y. A., April 2024, In: Global Policy

The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene - Review, Collins, Y. A., 8 Mar 2021, In: Antipode.

Regrow forests with locals' participation, Collins, Y. A., 28 May 2019, In: Nature. 569, 630

Book Chapters

Weathering Weather: Atmospheric Geographies of the Guiana Shield, Collins, Y. A., 2020, Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure. ICI Berlin Press, p. 181-205,

Raw Material: On Myths, Gold and Development in Suriname, Collins, Y. A., 2020, Swiss Psychotropic Gold. p. 3826-4230

Blog Posts

What do we mean by decolonizing conservation? A response to Lanjouw 2021, Collins, Y. A., 7 Oct 2021

New Research Project

  • Toward a Political Ecology of Volume

    This project uses a volumetric perspective to principally question the sustainability and equity of current and developing governance structures and use practices of the Earth’s ‘commons’. It explores the ways in which the continued integration of what was previously understood as ‘the commons’ into the purview of individual states and private actors destabilizes established norms and policies of environmental governance and makes the territorial claims of states and other actors more ‘voluminous’ (Billé, 2020).