Phil O'Keefe (December 1948 – 21 September 2020)[1] was emeritus professor at Northumbria University, and a geographer and development specialist with experience in East and Southern Africa.
In the 1970s he conducted his doctoral fieldwork in Tanzania, establishing a relationship between rural soil erosion and increased migration and urbanisation trends in Kenya.
[5] At his inaugural Professorial lecture in the mid 1990s, he finished by renouncing the professorship, as a protest against the title being rendered meaningless by its award to others in the university who lacked research records.
In addition, it provided research projects for Northumbria's Masters Programme on Sustainable Development and Disaster Management, which has graduated 350 students since 1990.
O'Keefe and colleagues argued that humanitarian assistance has important political dimensions, in conflict zones and linked to the power of states to conceal, deny aid, or practice new contemporary forms of colonialism.
[15] Other work addressed the effective incorporation of the poor into national policymaking; critiques of the Bruntland Report and formulation of the Millennium Development Goals; and the political economy of climate change adaptation.
From the late 1990s, working with ETC, he led studies of climate-change adaptation to poverty for the Netherlands Climate Assistance Programme, arguing for a shift in focus to better development and resilience, and publishing two books.