Professor Melissa Leach

Melissa is an Honorary Professor in the Department, alongside her role as Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), a unique partnership between the University and ten world-leading conservation organisations linking research with practical action for people and nature. CCI is based in the David Attenborough Building on the New Museums Site. 

She is an environmental and medical anthropologist, combining longstanding ethnographic work in West Africa with engagements and networks across Africa, Europe and beyond. Her work – including in interdisciplinary, policy-engaged programmes and consortia – addresses the cultures, histories and politics of knowledge and policy processes related to nature and environment, development and health. 

From 2014 – 2024 she was Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and earlier co-founded and co-directed the ESRC STEPS Centre. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to social science.

Publications

Melissa’s book-length works include:

• The earlier trilogy challenging deforestation narratives co-authored with James Fairhead (Misreading the African Landscape, Cambridge 1996; Reframing Deforestation, Cambridge 1998; Science, Society and Power, Cambridge 2003)
• The co-authored Dynamic Sustainabilities (Earthscan, 2010), Epidemics (Routledge, 2010), Vaccine Anxieties (Routledge, 2007), Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature? (Taylor and Francis 2014), The Politics of Green Transformations (2016) and Gender Equality and Sustainable Development (Taylor and Francis, 2016). 

Her current interests include human-nature relations from the perspective of communication and language, and she has recently completed a monograph on this topic ( Leach and Fairhead 2025 Naturekind: Language, Culture and Power Beyond the Human, Princeton University Press).