As a development sociologist and practitioner in international development and humanitarian assistance, Cindy Caron’s research focuses on gender relations in a variety of contexts: agricultural production, access to land and natural resources, land and natural resource governance, displacement, and reconstruction programming. She also researches adolescent girls empowerment programming and problematizes girlhood. Her research employs qualitative and interpretative methodologies.
She worked and conducted research in South Asia for over 25 years primarily in India, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. More recently she started working with development partners in Uganda, South Sudan, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Living in Sri Lanka at the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, she spent five years managing and implementing a variety of post-tsunami relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. For the United Nations, she managed a joint monitoring system that kept track of living conditions in over 400 transitional shelter sites housing tsunami-displaced families. She was Rehabilitation and Resettlement Program Manager for Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (Germany) providing financial support, construction training, and engineering oversight to displaced communities so that they could construct new homes.
She has worked with World Wildlife Fund-Bhutan, UNICEF, UNDP, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, CARE International, FAO, and the International Labor Organization (ILO). She also served as Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist and Senior Research and Evaluation Manager on land rights programming with the Seattle-based non-profit, Landesa.
She speaks, to varying degrees, both Sinhala and Tamil and has published a Sinhala-to-English translation of a children’s novel. Her publications can be found in the Journal of Extreme Events, Development in Practice, Contemporary South Asia, Forced Migration Review, Progress in Development Studies and the Journal of International Humanitarian Action.
She provides consulting services as a sub-contractor on USAID task orders, first with the Cloudburst Consulting Group on STARR ERC and now with TetraTech on CASA. She serves as a co-PI working with group of faculty and students updating USAID Climate Risk Profiles.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1990-6529