Betsy Taylor

Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN)

Betsy Taylor is a cultural anthropologist who has worked primarily in Central Appalachia and Northeast India. She is the founding Director of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a link-tank to connect communities and scholars in action research for sustainable livelihoods, community resilience, and community-centered policy (www.likenknowledge.org). As a “link-tank,” LiKEN’s core mission is to support local economies, community happiness, and health by building up and redefining local resources, encouraging reliable teamwork, and creating open and fair information sharing networks. LiKEN's projects focus on disaster resilience, forest livelihoods, water quality, land ownership and revenues, and community voices. LiKEN's community-led networks are primarily in Central Appalachia and Indigenous communities. A long term goal of Dr. Taylor's work is to develop methodologies for building long term collaboration between communities, experts, and government. Dr. Taylor's international experience is deep and wide. While she was with Future Generations Institute, she initiated a statewide project for women-led, community development in Arunachal Pradesh, a Himalayan province with over two dozen tribal groups, and conducted program evaluations over the next 10 years.

Dr. Taylor is a scholar of civil society, participatory planning and democratic governance of natural resources. She has four decades of field experience across central Appalachia in diverse ethnographic and participatory action research projects. Her theoretical work is on democratic public space cross-culturally, with particular focus on regions impacted by extractive industry. She co-authored, with Herbert Reid, the book, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2010). She has held research faculty positions at the University of Kentucky and Virginia Tech. From 2012-2017, she was appointed to the steering committee of the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, by the Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. She received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan.