Christopher Patrick Alexander Bennett is the Provincial Programs Strategist for GGGI in Indonesia. Over the past 30 years, Chris Bennett has worked mostly in Indonesia, also in other Asian, African and Central American countries, on natural resource management and governance with a special focus on forestry and agroforestry. His analytical work has covered the root causes of unsustainability, uncertainty of tenure, undervaluation of natural resources and under-regulation of negative neighborhood effects. His implementation programs have often centered on establishment of equitable spatial certainty that incentivize sustainable investments by smallholders, rural communities and the private sector in renewable natural resources and such initiatives enable the poor harness their human, social and knowledge assets for increased land productivity with positive downstream effects. One aspect of this work has been the successful promotion of inclusive landscape-based approaches built on inter-institutional trust to replace exclusive and overly-sectoral projects that are often plagued by uncoordinated behavior and divisive social jealousies.

Underpinning these landscape-based initiatives have been increased awareness that environmental management and economic growth are not two different choices but rather mutually-reinforcing. Playing a major role is mapping initiatives for stakeholders through visualization of science- and experience-based outcomes various scales—household, community, corporate, sub-landscape and landscape-wide— comparing business-as-usual with optimal development pathways.

He also teaches university courses and works on impact evaluation analytics for policies and projects to improve aid effectiveness. Aimed at informing project implementers, beneficiaries and designers as well as policy-makers, the metrics of impact evaluation analytics emphasize outcome-based indicators that can be participatorily assessed, comparisons with counterfactual sites, shared learning among stakeholders, answering, “what we thought we knew but experience taught us otherwise,” and “what will happen on the first day after the last day of the project or policy?” for exit strategies and post-project sustainability, respectively.