Cynthia Caron ‘94 M.F.S.

Clark University

REDD+ Programming in Zambia

Cynthia Caron is Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change at Clark University in Worcester MA, where she teaches courses on land and resource management, gender and development, and research methods and methodologies at both the undergraduate and graduate level.  Prof. Caron serves as a Land Tenure and Natural Resource Management and Gender Specialist at the Cloudburst Consulting Group. At Cloudburst, she co-designed and co-facilitated USAID’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on land tenure and property rights and regularly provides technical assistance to Cloudburst-led, USAID performance evaluations in Latin America and Lebanon and impact evaluations in sub-Saharan Africa.  Prior to joining Clark, she spent 15 years working in the international development sector in India and Sri Lanka. In 2008, she establishing the Applied Research Unit for the United Nations Office of Project Services (UNOPS) to coordinate and implement multi-sector assessments following complex emergencies such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2008 floods in Pakistan.  As Senior Research and Evaluation Manager at Landesa, she conducted cross-national research on land tenure security in Rwanda, India, and Ethiopia. In addition to consultancies for World Wildlife Fund and CARE International, she regularly publishes in peer review journals such as Society and Natural Resources, Contemporary South Asia, and Journal of International Development.