Raymond L. Bryant

Raymond L. Bryant is a British-Canadian geographer and Professor of Political Ecology at King's College London, retiring in September 2020. He is known for his contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology.
Education and career.
Bryant studied politics to receive a BA (Hons) from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1983 and an MA from Carleton University, Canada, in 1989. He received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1993 for research on forestry in Burma.
Bryant has been active in the Department of Geography at King's College London since 1993. He has also taught at Cambridge University, Yale University and University College London and has, among other places, been invited to speak at the universities in Oxford, Chicago and Copenhagen.
He serves on the editorial boards of Political Geography, and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.
Scholarship.
Political ecology.
Bryant has played a key role in the development of political ecology as an interdisciplinary field, with implications in geography, anthropology, and development studies. With Sinéad Bailey, he published the landmark "Third World Political Ecology" (Routledge, 1997) arguing that the costs and benefits of environmental change always are distributed unequally. Environmental change also reinforces or alters social and economic inequalities as well as power relations. Bryant and Bailey developed an actor-centred perspective to show how environmental change is shaped by actors on different scales with unequal power resources.
Bryant has continued to synthesize research in the field, most recently in the "International Handbook of Political Ecology" (Edward Elgar, 2015).
Forestry.
A key theme in Bryant's research has been the politics of forestry, particularly in Burma. He has studied how the Burmese state historically has sought to control forests and forest-related activities, but also how other environmental actors including peasants, loggers, and transnational corporations have contested state control.
As part of a wider effort to study ethical consumption, he has contributed to our understanding of the knowledge regimes and violence associated with teak branding for Western markets.
NGOs and moral capital.
Another theme in Bryant's research has been the role of NGOs in environmental struggles and the way such organizations strategize and empower themselves by generating 'moral capital'. Through in-depth studies of NGOs in the Philippines, he argues that the 'quest for moral capital' is compromised by NGOs' need to work with political and economic elites.
Personal life.
Bryant lives with his wife and two children in London.