Dr Matt Fortnam

About me:

Matt is an interdisciplinary social scientist with an interest in applying social-ecological and resilience thinking to diverse research fields and policy domains, including climate change, marine management and humanitarian and development policy. His commitment to co-producing knowledge with practitioners has been intrinsic to his undertaking of frontier research that addresses global challenges.

Matt joined University of Exeter in 2016, following the completion of his PhD at University College London. He has previously worked for the United Nations Environment Programme and provided technical advice through consultancies for diverse international environmental, development and humanitarian organisations, including FAO, UNICEF, FCDO, Care International, and WWF.

Matt is currently a Researcher Co-I on the SMMR Resilience of Coastal Communities project at Exeter and consulting for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and Centre for Humanitarian Change.

Much of his research has been focused on East Africa, Southeast Asia and, more recently, the UK.

Interests:

Matt’s current research falls into two main areas:

Resilience: Matt has applied his knowledge of resilience and social-ecological systems to a range of policy domains. For the FCDO Maintains programme, he led research on the climate resilience of the Kenya health system. With UNICEF and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, he is exploring how social-ecological systems thinking could improve famine analysis and response. For the ROCC project, Matt is involved in developing a nexus perspective on resilience, wellbeing and sustainability to acknowledge that any solution for one objective must equally consider the other two in the nexus.

Governance: Matt’s research has examined governance and its outcomes. He specialises in developing and applying participatory methods to explore the drivers of, and barriers to, transitions in governance towards sustainability. Matt is also interested in how hard choices are made between who wins and loses because of decisions and interventions, and how such trade-off decision-making processes could be supported to achieve more equitable and sustainable outcomes. To this end, he has developed and is piloting the Marine Planning Trade-off Analysis (MaPTA) tool in the ROCC project.

Qualifications:

University College London, UK (2012-2016)
PhD in Resilience, Environment and Development

University College London, UK (2010-2011)
Environment, Science and Society MSc, Distinction

Cardiff University, UK (2000-2004)
Geography BSc, First Class Honours

Career:

Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter (2016 - present)

Projects:

• SMMR Resilience of Coastal Communities (ROCC) project (2021- present)
• GCRF Blue Communities programme (2018- 2022)
• ESPA Sustainable Poverty Alleviation and Ecosystem Services (SPACES) project (2016-2018)

Research consultant (2010 - present)

Recent projects:

• UNICEF: Technical assistance on climate sensitive nutrition programming
• FAO EAF-Nansen programme: design of training course and handbook on shared fish stock management
• UNICEF: Applying social-ecological systems thinking to famine analysis
• FCDO Maintaining Essential Services after Natural Disasters (Maintains) programme

Research assistant, University of Bristol (2007-2010)

Programme officer, Global International Waters Assessment, United Nations Environment Programme (2003-2006)