Faculty Member

Jessica’s work focuses on stewardship of biocultural landscapes, community engagement in conservation, and governance of protected areas. She brings to the New England Biolabs Foundation three decades of experience with community-based conservation, having worked in coun­tries of the Caribbean, Mesoamer­ica, Andean South Amer­ica, Cen­tral and East­ern Europe, and the Balkans. Prior to joining the foundation, Jessica was senior vice president of the Quebec-Labrador Foundation/Atlantic Center for the Environment (QLF), a US-Canadian organization, where she was responsible for international capacity-building and exchange programs in diverse regions, and was a founding partner of the US National Park Service’s Stewardship Institute. A current member of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), Jessica chairs its Protected Landscapes Specialist Group, a global working group that advises on policy and management issues related to biocultural landscapes and serves as a platform for research and dissemination of case-study experience. She plays a leadership role with several NGOs and foundation affinity groups, serving as chair of the board of Terralingua, vice president of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples, and on the advisory boards of New England International Donors and the Sacred Natural Sites Initiative. Recently, she has consulted with the UNDP/Global Environmental Facility Small Grants Programme and its Community Management of Protected Areas for Conservation initiative (COMPACT). Jessica has published and lectured widely on topics related to protected areas and stewardship of biocultural landscapes. Recent publications include: Stewardship of protected landscapes by communities: diverse landscapes, diverse governance models (Brown 2015); Engaging local communities in stewardship of World Heritage: A methodology based on the COMPACT experience (Brown and Hay-Edie 2014); Conservation as if people also mattered: Policy and practice of community-based conservation (Kothari, Camill and Brown 2013); and The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community (Brown, Mitchell and Beresford, eds. 2005). She is an associate member of the Graduate Faculty of Rutgers University (Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies), and has recently served as visiting faculty at Tsukuba University (Japan), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property - ICCROM (Italy) and as a guest speaker at the University of Vermont and the University of Georgia. She holds degrees from Clark University (International Development) and Brown University (Biology and Environmental Studies). Jessica lives in Newbury, Massachusetts with her husband and their two children.