Brian Dill

Development has long promised richer economies, broader political voice, and better lives. It has just as often delivered dispossession, dependence, and decisions about whose knowledge counts. My research begins from this tension. Rather than asking only whether development "works," I ask what development owes to the people and places it has harmed — and what it would take to build institutions capable of repair.

I develop this argument through the concept of reparative development, which reorients the field around three questions: How can knowledge production be pluralized so that communities set the terms of what counts as expertise? How can histories of extraction be redressed through the return of land, resources, and authority? And how can relations of dependence be rebuilt as relations of reciprocity? These questions are being answered, unevenly and experimentally, in real places — and studying those places is the heart of my work.

My current research centers on the Pacific Northwest and the Klamath Basin, a region remaking itself after a century of industrial timber harvest, hydroelectric development, and Indigenous dispossession. I study how forest collaboratives bring former adversaries — tribes, agencies, environmentalists, and timber communities — into shared governance of public lands, and how landmark efforts such as the removal of the Klamath dams and the return of the Blue Creek watershed to the Yurok Tribe are turning repair into an institutional project. This work builds on two decades of research on development politics in Tanzania, including my book Fixing the African State.

I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in development, environmental sociology, political sociology, and questions of repair, redistribution, and collective governance.