Jamila Haider's research focuses on farming resilience and relational approaches to understanding human-nature relationships, and co-leads the “Doing Sustainability Research” theme.

Jamila Haider is a researcher at Stockholm Resilience Centre, where she co-leads the “Doing Sustainability Research” theme. Haider’s research focuses on the resilience of food systems, specifically examining how interventions enable or constrain the capacity of small-scale farmers to deal with change in landscapes with high biological and cultural diversity. Her empirical research focuses on the co-evolutionary dynamics between cultural and biological diversity in mountain landscapes, and Heider's theoretical contributions to resilience and sustainability sciences draw on feminist post-humanities scholarship. A third stream of her research centres on reflexively engaging in what it means to do rigorous and impactful sustainability science in caring ways.

Haider engages in critical action research and aims to embody transformative ways of being and working to achieve societal transformations towards sustainability. She is the Principal Investigator of ASSEMBLE: Assembling novel spaces for food systems presentation, and leads a work package in the Agroecology Partnership-funded TAELabs: Territorial Agroecological Living Labs. Heider also leads a PhD course in Qualitative Methodologies and teaches a course on research design in the MSc course at SRC.

Jamila Haider is a sustainability researcher with expertise in social sustainability science and participatory qualitative methods. Her PhD (2017) from Stockholm Resilience Centre was on “Development and Resilience: Re-thinking poverty and intervention in biocultural landscapes”. She holds a Master’s degree in Geography from the University of Cambridge, UK and Bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Biology from Carleton University, Canada. Between 2009 and 2011, Haider worked as a development practitioner with the Aga Khan Development Network in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

In addition to scientific writing, Haider writes non-fiction books. Her first book, “With Our Own Hands: A Celebration of Food and Life in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan”, was co-produced with local communities in the Pamirs, and 2000 copies were distributed to each community. The book describes the biocultural history of the Pamir Mountains through food, and celebrates otherwise marginalised knowledge.

For the past three years, she has been engaged in a long-term collaborative ethnography where she is learning the craft of alpine cow farming and cheese making. Together with farmer Präa Sepp, Heider is currently writing a narrative non-fiction book, exploring sufficiency at the heart of sustainability and what it means to become truly alive in the face of uncertainty.

Practice, policy engagement, and networks

Jamila Haider is a co-founder of the Careoperative, a network of sustainability scholars and practitioners dedicated to enacting more caring and inclusive values in academia, publishing under the pseudonym of Dr. Care. She is a long-time member and currently a board member of the International Network of Resource Information Centres (Balaton Group). Haider is on the editorial board of the Journals Sustainability Science and Global Sustainability. Haider is a (reserve) board member of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

She has held research affiliations with the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Vienna, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and the University of Innsbruck, currently (2026).

Haider’s new project, ASSEMBLE, will host a series of dialogues with farmers in rural farming communities, aiming to understand the conditions for enabling novel responses to change (resilience) and how this understanding can enhance farming resilience amidst rapidly changing regulatory environments. Recognising the challenges posed by climate change and loss of biological and cultural diversity in Europe’s iconic grasslands, the project addresses the need for transformative solutions in European agriculture.

Awards and achievements

• 2016 “World’s Best Cook Book” by Gourmand World CookBook Awards
• 2017 The Ranald MacDonald Award for a monumental work €5,000
• 2024 FORMAS Career Grant
• 2024 Horizon Agroecology
• 2019 The King Carl XVI Gustaf's 50th Fund for Science, Tech & Environment
• 2019 VR international postdoc grant
• 2018 Outstanding Article Award, Sustainability Science Journal (Main author)

Supervision

Sara Matthée, MSc, main supervisor.
Pia von den Benken, MSc, main supervisor.
Elissa Clay, PhD, main supervisor.