Jennifer Franco Senior Researcher
Jenny joined TNI in 2006 as a researcher and initiated the agrarian justice program that later evolved into the current agrarian and environmental justice (AEJ) cluster at TNI, in which since 2018, she has been a senior researcher. She has, since 2011, worked on land issues in Myanmar, where she is also part of the TNI Myanmar-In-Focus Program. She works on the issues of land, forest, water and ocean politics, climate change & just transition politics, food systems/migrant farmworkers, state/social movements interaction, knowledge politics & scholar-activism. She works in a collaborative knowledge production process among grassroots activists and university-based scholar-activists, uses participatory action research method, and frames research at a landscape level. She has done both in-depth research and short field visits in Southeast Asia, China, Africa, Latin America and Europe.
She coordinated collaborative research projects, such as the European Commission-funded 13-country research study on land grabbing and land concentration in Europe with a major scholar-activist book output, and a DFID-funded research project “when the poor make law” in the Philippines and Brazil that resulted in a monograph that was a Finalist for the prestigious National Book Award in the Philippines. She was a co-coordinator of the NWO-funded major research project, Mosaic, that uses a landscape approach in the study of land grabs and conflict in Myanmar and Cambodia. She co-coordinated and co-guest edited journal Special Issues, including: Migrants, Farmers and Farmworkers: production and social reproduction (Agriculture and Human Values journal); The spectacular land rush and its consequences (Globalizations journal); Flex crops and commodities (Journal of Peasant Studies); Water grabbing? (Water Alternatives journal); and well as the forthcoming journal Special Issue: “Democratizing Knowledge Politics” (Third World Quarterly).
Her (co-)authored books include: Essential Concepts of Land Politics, Bound by Law: Filipino rural poor and the search for justice in a plural-legal landscape, and Elections and Democratization in the Philippines. Her co-authored book, Scholar-Activism and Land Politics, was translated to and published in Spanish, Indonesian and Burmese in 2025, and the French, Portuguese and Italian editions in 2027. Her co-edited volumes include: The Oxford handbook of land politics (Oxford University Press). Her latest co-authored monograph book is (with S.M. Borras, T. Moreda and Y. Xu), Climate and land politics, and it will be released in 2027 by Cambridge University Press.
For the list of her publications, refer to her Google Scholar profile here. Several of her academic and activist publications have contributed to setting new research and advocacy agendas on land grabbing, green grabbing, flex crops, political reactions to enclosures, water grabbing, scholar-activism, climate change & land, and 5Rs (Redistribution, Recognition, Restitution, Regeneration and Representation).
She serves on the journal Editorial Board of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space; and Agriculture and Human Values. She previously served on the advisory board of ACKnowl-EJ, an academic-activist project linked to the EJAtlas founded by Joan Martinez-Alier, and was a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). She is an Adjunct Professor at China Agricultural University. She has co-mentored formally and informally graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and has initiated an innovative ‘activist course for activists’ that, since 2018, has trained more than 700 grassroots social movement participants in Southeast Asia and Middle East and North Africa.
Latest work
Key documents
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The 5Rs in Myanmar Five principles for a future federal democratic system where rural working people can flourishPublication date:
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