Professor Martin Walsh

Martin Walsh is a freelance consultant and Adjunct Professor in the School of Business Studies and Humanities, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST), Arusha, Tanzania. Until recently, he was a Senior Researcher in Oxfam GB, researching civil society engagement and developing research quality to support campaigns, humanitarian responses, and development programmes worldwide. He created and edited the online Oxfam Research Guidelines, and was a member of Main Panel C (covering the Social Sciences) for REF 2014.

Before joining Oxfam, Martin worked for more than 20 years as a development consultant, practitioner and project manager for a variety of agencies and organisations, including the Natural Resources Institute in the University of Greenwich. He has also been a Research Fellow in the University of Sussex and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his MA and PhD.

His research interests range across the political economy and anthropology of international development and environmentalism, and he has published in many different fields, with an ethnographic focus on East Africa, where he lived and worked for many years. His recent work includes a joint study of populism and its consequences for international NGOs, and ongoing collaborative research on the politics of conservation and conflicts of knowledge and practice in Zanzibar.

Martin continues to advise UK higher education institutions preparing for the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021), is a Senior Member of Wolfson College in the University of Cambridge, and the Book Reviews Editor of Tanzanian Affairs, the bulletin of the Britain-Tanzania Society.

For a full list of his publications see here.