Tobias Haller is Extraordinary Professor in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland and lecturer at the ETH Zurich. He has conducted fieldwork in Cameroon and Zambia and specializes in economic and ecological anthropology, common pool resource management, New Institutionalism, local perceptions of environment, peasants and agro-pastoralists, fishermen, oil exploitation, protected areas, and community-based natural resource management. He teaches courses on economic, political, and ecological anthropology on topics such as sustainable use of natural resources, environmental perception, conservation and protected areas, land tenure issues, and the anthropology of mining.Tobias Haller has led various comparative research projects on institutional change in floodplain areas in Africa (Disputing the Floodplains, 2010), participative resource management in protected areas (People, Protected Areas and Global Change, 2008), and the implications of the oil and mining industry (Fossil Fuels, Oil Companies and Indigenous Peoples, 2007; The Open Cut, 2015). He is currently studying gender relations in regions of major agricultural investment, and participative processes of institution genesis in the context of sustainable use (“constitutionality”).
He is on board member of the Swiss Society for African Studies and a member of the Institute for Ecology and Action Anthropology (INFOE CH). Through the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at the University of Bern, he is closely involved in the BA and MA programs on Sustainable Development and various joint inter- and transdisciplinary projects.