National Center for Scientific Research (French CNRS)
PSL Research University: EPHE-UPVD-CNRS, USR 3278 CRIOBE
Laboratoire d’Excellence « CORAIL» [tamatoa.bambridge@criobe.pf]
Bio
A scientist with training in legal anthropology, Dr. Tamatoa Bambridge is a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) working in a laboratory of marine biology in Moorea since 2007. He has more than twenty years of field research experience in many of the archipelagoes of French Polynesia. Much of his work deals with land and marine tenure rooted in his early fieldwork on land and kinship in the Austral Islands. Dr. Bambridge is an expert in local empowerment of capacity development as more and more situation encountered have to deal with legal pluralism issues within lagoon governance and he focuses his current work on land and sea governance and their impacts on adaptation and resilience, using anthropological methods of long term presence on the field, language and uses as ways of expressing people’s engagements with and conflicts over space, time, and governance. His long term commitment to the understanding of Polynesian traditional management of resources lead to the publication of “The Rahui” in 2016 (Australian National University Press). Dr Bambridge teaches at the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), at the University of french Polynesia and the University of New Caledonia at research master level. He is the president of the scientific committee of the Unesco Man and Biospere reserve of Fakarava in the Tuamotu Archipelago.
Projects
Dr. Bambridge’s current primary research is focused on the intersection between biodiversity, culture, and languages and the factors influencing resilience and hybrid governance. He also uses tools such as modelisation and actor participation for elucidating spatially explicit strategies on lagoon and reefs. At the EPHE, he has PhD students working on community, biodiversity and governance in Latin America and Oceania.f