John Farrington has been a Research Fellow in the Rural Policy Group of the UK based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) for the last 18 years, and was Coordinator of the Group for almost 10 years. He has a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Reading University, where he is also currently Visiting Professor in the Department for International and Rural Development. He has spent eight years on long-term overseas assignments, in Malawi, Sri Lanka and Bolivia. He has worked extensively in India in the last ten years, on public/private partnerships in service delivery, the changing roles of local government in relation to natural resources management, rural livelihood diversification, the distribution of benefits from growth, and the interface between social protection and growth promotion.

Cecilia Luttrell has worked in the Rural Policy and Forest Policy and Environment Groups of the Overseas Development Institute since 2002 previously having been based in the Centre for Social and Environmental Research into the Global Environment at the University of East Anglia. Her main research interests focus on issues of livelihood vulnerability, adaptation and governance and the impacts of policy change on tenure and equity. Her PhD examined natural resource use and institutional change in Vietnam, concentrating on shifts in resource tenure and livelihood impacts. In recent years she has been involved in the development of management and planning systems for land and forest use in Vietnam and Ghana having worked for DFID in the Forestry Planning Department in Ghana, Wetlands International in Indonesia and various conservation and community development projects in Ghana, Indonesia, the Cook Islands and Tanzania.