Prof. Benno Pokorny

Prof. Dr. Benno Pokorny holds a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He worked as a postgraduate lecturer in socio-economy at the Federal University of Rural Amazon (UFRA) in Brazil and was a senior associate researcher at the Centre of International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Since 2003, he has been a full professor of Forestry and Rural Development at the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg. Currently, he is a National Coordinator of Bioeconomy at the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). For more than 20 years, he has been studying the role of smallholders and forests in the context of rural development in the tropics and subtropics in Latin-America, Asia, and Africa. He has coordinated several inter- and transdisciplinary international research and development projects on local development.