Biography
Professor Emmanuel Sulle is a PLAAS Research Fellow and a member of the Conference on Land Policy in Africa 2025 Scientific Committee. Prof Sulle is also an Assistant Professor and Director of Arusha Climate and Environmental Research Centre (AKU-ACER) in Tanzania, and a member of the Global Faculty at the University of Cologne. He is well-known as a leading scholar on agrarian studies in Africa and a contributor to the Network of Excellence on Land Governance in Africa.
He holds a PhD in Land and Agrarian Studies from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Master’s degree in Public Policy majoring in Environmental Policy from the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, United States. Emmanuel has won various awards for his academic excellence including Harvard University Doctoral Student Fellowship and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Doctoral Grant. He currently holds a visiting fellow award from the University of Cologne, Germany and a visiting scientist grant from Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Prior to joining AKU, Professor Sulle worked at PLAAS, where he led diverse groups of researchers on numerous complex studies in over seven countries in Eastern, Southern, Western and Northern Africa. These include large projects on women’s land rights with field research teams in seven countries and development corridors in four countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.
These multi-country and multi-disciplinary research experiences have helped him develop considerable leadership skills in managing research projects in different contexts and diverse groups. His current research interests include climate change, environment, sustainable agriculture, policy analysis, green economy, land tenure and agrarian transformation in Africa.