Ryan Edwards

Ryan B. Edwards is a consultant to the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), a PhD candidate in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics at the Australian National University (ANU), and an associate of the Indonesia Project and Development Policy Centre at the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, where he taught a wide range of graduate-level courses in economics and public policy. Ryan’s pre-doctoral career spans the non-government international development, financial services, and state and federal government sectors, most recently working on education funding reforms, impact evaluation policy, and federal budgets in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Ryan’s current research focuses on understanding (a) how booming natural resource sectors—specifically palm oil and mining—affect long-term human development outcomes through structural change, labor markets, and spatial aspects of development; (b) linkages between different models of smallholder agriculture and supply chains, and how these linkages differentially affect agricultural productivity, welfare, and environmental outcomes; and (c) how changes in the natural environment and natural resource sectors affect social cohesion and conflict. In 2016 Ryan will join FSE as a postdoctoral scholar working on the Poverty Alleviation through Sustainable Palm Oil Production project.