Melissa LEACH

Melissa Leach is Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation initiative (CCI), a collaboration between ten world-leading nature and biodiversity organisations with the University of Cambridge, where she is Professor of Social Anthropology. Her international experience combines thirty years of ethnographic work in West Africa with engagements and networks across Africa, South Asia, China and beyond. She has led interdisciplinary, policy-engaged programmes and consortia across the fields of sustainability transformations, forests and agriculture, global health, food systems, and social and gender equity, with special interests in the politics of knowledge and policy processes. From 2014 – 2024 she was Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and earlier co-founded and co-directed the ESRC STEPS Centre. Her international roles include leadership of UN reports and membership of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).