Jayalaxshmi Mistry

Jay Mistry is Professor of Environmental Geography at Royal Holloway University of London and Co-Director of the social enterprise Cobra Collective CIC. Her research interests lie in environmental management and governance, with a commitment to a social-ecological approach and working in collaboration with other academics, governments, civil society organisations and Indigenous communities.

The central concept running through her work is that environmental management and governance should not be top-down implementation of external expertise, but must involve active local participation building upon local and Indigenous knowledges and practices.

Her work converges environmental and social science methods, within a framework of participatory action research using participatory video. She has long-term research collaborations with Indigenous communities in Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela.