Wolfram Dressler

Professor Wolfram Dressler serves as Professor in Geography within the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne, part of the Faculty of Science. He obtained his PhD from McGill University. Earlier in his career, Dressler was affiliated with the University of Queensland's School of Social Science, where he conducted research in anthropology and resource management and geography. He held an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship from 2014 to 2018, which examined Indigenous social responses to conservation and development interventions in Southeast Asia.

Dressler's research focuses on human-environment relations through a critical political ecology approach, emphasizing conservation, development projects, agrarian change, and livelihoods, primarily in Southeast Asia such as the Philippines and Indonesia. Key publications include the co-edited book 'Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age' (2014, University of Arizona Press); his monograph 'For the Sake of Forests and Gods: Governing Life and Livelihood in the Philippine Uplands' (2025, Cornell University Press); 'From hope to crisis and back again? A critical history of the global CBNRM narrative' (2010, Environmental Conservation); 'Trends, drivers and impacts of changes in swidden cultivation in tropical forest-agriculture frontiers: a global assessment' (2012, Global Environmental Change); 'Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness' (2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences); 'Swidden transformations and rural livelihoods in Southeast Asia' (2009, Human Ecology); and 'Half-Earth or Whole Earth? Radical ideas for conservation, and their implications' (2017, Oryx). These contributions, with several papers exceeding 400 citations, have profoundly influenced discourse on neoliberal conservation, Indigenous rights, and environmental governance. Dressler has also received ARC Discovery grants, including DP1096157.

Professional Email: wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.au