Biography
Aiora is Senior Fellow at the Department of Land Economy, which she joined again in 2020 to coordinate and deliver lectures in Environmental Policy and Economics.
She's Lecturer in Economics at The Open University since 2022.
Between 2017 and 2021 she was full-time Senior Editor at Nature Sustainability.
She has taught environmental policy, economics and methods since 2013. She has published research on a range of sustainability policies, such as environmental and conservation programs in rural areas in Mexico and South Africa, deforestation drivers at large scales, peatland fires in Indonesia, and public policy for sustainable transport to industrial estates.
Her methods' expertise includes R statistical language, Q methodology, econometrics, multi-criteria decision methods, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and data visualisation.
Education:
- PhD Environmental Policy & Economics (Cantab)
- MSc Environmental Policy/ Governance (Oxon)
- Postgraduate in Ecological Economics (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
- BSc Environmental Sciences (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Research
Research focused on challenges for implementation and effectiveness of environmental and sustainability governance across scales, particularly on two areas: understanding the diversity of views on controversial or conflictual issues, and the spatial variability of impacts. This includes adoption and diffusion of sustainable land-use practices, social implications of biodiversity indicators and drivers and motivations of behavioural change.
She approaches these questions using a pluralistic methodological approach. Topics include, among others, the social and economic implications of a large wetland restoration program in South Africa, the political economy of rural livelihood change in Mexico, discourses about peatland fire solutions in Indonesia, the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices in the tropical forest frontier, and multi-criteria evaluation of sustainable transport policies.
Recent work includes analysing acceptability of waste-to-energy facilities (with Univ. of Basque Country), barriers for sustainable aquaculture certification (with Univ. of Tokyo), and the sustainability of post-pandemic recovery policies.
Publications
- Phelps, Zabala et al. 2021. Experts and resource users split over solutions to peatland fires. World Development 146
- Carmenta, Zabala et al. 2021. Evaluating bundles of interventions to prevent peat-fires in Indonesia. Global Environmental Change
- Zabala, Sandbrook & Mukherjee. 2018. When and how to use Q methodology to understand perspectives in conservation research.
Conservation Biology, 32(5):1185–1194 - Zabala & Sullivan. 2018. Multilevel assessment of a large-scale programme for poverty alleviation and wetland conservation: lessons from South Africa. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 61(3):493–514
- Zabala, Pascual & García-Barrios. 2017. Payments for pioneers? Revisiting the role of external rewards for sustainable innovation under heterogeneous motivations. Ecological Economics, 135:234–245
- Carmenta, Zabala, Daeli, Phelps 2017. Perceptions across scales of governance and the Indonesian peatland fires. Global Environmental Change, 46, 50–59
- Zabala. 2014. 'qmethod': a package to analyse human perspectives using Q methodology. The R Journal, 6(2):163-173
- Azizah, Ishihara, Zabala et al. 2020. Diverse Perceptions on Eco-Certification for Shrimp Aquaculture in Indonesia. Sustainability, 12(22), 9387
- Zabala et al. 2019. Natural Capital. in Eaton and Sheng (Ed.), The Inclusive Green Economy: Policies and practice. United Nations Environment Programme
- Jucker, (...) Zabala et al. 2018. Ten‐year assessment of the 100 priority questions for global biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology, 32(6):1457–1463
- Mukherjee, Zabala et al. 2018. Comparison of techniques for eliciting views and judgements in decision-making. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 9:54–63
- Zabala. 2018. Comparing Global Spatial Data on Deforestation for Institutional Analysis in Africa. In B. Huang (Ed.), Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems (pp. 371-388). Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences. Elsevier
- Larcom, van Gevelt & Zabala. 2016. Precolonial institutions and deforestation in Africa. Land Use Policy, 51:150–161
- Zabala & Pascual. 2016. Bootstrapping Q methodology to improve the understanding of human perspectives. PLoS One, 11(2):e0148087
- Zabala. 2009. Walking the green carpet to work (A multicriteria analysis of policy measures to promote sustainable transport to industrial estates). International Journal of Sustainable Development, 12(1):78
- Scolobig, Castán-Broto & Zabala. 2008. Integrating multiple perspectives in social multicriteria evaluation of flood-mitigation alternatives: the case of Malborghetto-Valbruna. Environment and Planning C: Government & Policy, 26(6):1143-1161
Teaching and Supervisions
- EP02: Environmental Policy and Economics (module coordinator). MPhil.
- Paper 5: Environmental Economics and Law. Undergraduate.
- MPhil thesis supervision.
