Girma Kelboro Mensuro
Girma Kelboro Mensuro holds a PhD from the University of Hohenheim with his doctoral thesis entitled “Unraveling the Parks and People Dichotomy: Local Interests and Conflicts in Nech Sar National Park, Ethiopia”. He conducted his study and research on conservation and development towards the doctoral degree holding a position of junior researcher as a DAAD scholar at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. He received an MSc degree in Tropical Forestry and a BSc degree in forestry. He currently works at the position of Senior Researcher at ZEF in the field of Environmental Social Science with main research interests in cultural landscape heritage, social-ecological systems, political ecology, biodiversity conservation, protected areas, and community forestry. He advises students, writes extensively and teaches courses on the challenges and opportunities in environmental management, biodiversity conservation and livelihoods, participatory research methodology, rural-urban interfaces/urbanization and smallholder farming at the University of Bonn and Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.
He is a PI of research projects on rural-urban interfaces and cultural landscape heritages in Eastern Africa funded by the German Research Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation respectively. He has taught courses including natural resource policy, participatory watershed management, community forestry, indigenous knowledge and conflict management at Wondo Genet College of Forestry and Natural Resources at Hawassa University, and Jimma University. Before joining academics and research, he had accumulated a broad practical experience as a forester in the Commission for Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Rehabilitation in Southern Ethiopia for four years.