Mercy Afua Adutwumwaa Derkyi

Mercy holds BSc and MSc in Natural Resource Management and Agroforestry respectively from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). She graduated with Doctor of Philosophy in Social Science from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in the Netherlands in 2012 with a book titled ‘’Fighting over forest: Interactive governance of conflicts over forest and tree resources in Ghana’s high forest zone’’. Her scope of research and practice has been the forest zone of Ghana which has endowed her 13 years working experiences across the state forest sector, non-governmental organization and academic arena. Her professional specialties are in natural resource governance, conflict management, urban forestry, agroforestry, livelihoods, facilitation, environmental law and policy. Other areas of interest are climate change, law enforcement, gender mainstreaming, social learning and recent interest in supply chain management concepts like outsourcing, competitive bidding and procurement.

Mercy’s current research interest is the social-natural-governing nexus systems. She believes that sustainable NRM will be achieved if there is better understanding, reconciling and synergising of the governing system (i.e. policies and laws), social system (people) and the natural system and their interactions thereof. She has received 3 research awards: i) Visiting Scholar programme by United Nations University – Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA); ii) PhD funded by Tropenbos International Ghana and iii) Research Grant by AFORNET. She has participated in many (inter) national conferences, workshops and training programmes.

Mercy has supervised and co-supervised five masters’ students. With respect to publications, she has 2 (one published and other accepted) peer reviewed journal papers, 1 book, 2 community livelihoods manuals, 1 newsletter, 3 chapters in proceedings and 4 info-sheets to her credit. Mercy is a member of Ghana Institute of Foresters and Ghana Science Association.