Dr. Amity Doolittle began developing the Success Lab while grappling with recurring obstacles in both her professional and personal life. Her academic training in anthropology, political ecology, and environmental history shaped her conviction that the critical frameworks of the social sciences and humanities can help guide pathways toward more sustainable and just futures. However, after 20 years of teaching these approaches to graduate students at the Yale School of the Environment, she has observed that the socio-ecological complexities revealed through social science research are often lost in translation. In many cases, the disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge she values is not readily usable for environmental practitioners. The Success Lab was created to bridge this gap by making insights from social science research more accessible and actionable for environmental managers.
Beyond the Success Lab, Dr. Doolittle’s research centers on property rights and the ways in which control over and access to natural resources are defined, negotiated, and contested among different stakeholders. Her work seeks to understand the social and political processes that have produced enduring inequities and unequal distributions of the benefits and burdens associated with natural resources. Drawing on anthropology, political science, environmental history, and political ecology, her research examines legal and cultural pluralism and how these dynamics shape environmental governance and resource management at the local level.
Her research spans diverse geographic and thematic contexts. She has studied smallholder coffee producers in the mountains of Honduras, who face pressures from international conservation efforts alongside insecure land rights. She has also examined how historical processes—including 17th-century colonization, 18th-century sanitary reform and the City Beautiful Movement, and 19th-century urban development initiatives such as ghetto removal—have shaped the contemporary socio-ecological landscape of New Haven. In Southeast Asia, her work has explored how colonial-era treatment of native customary land rights continues to influence present-day conflicts between Indigenous communities and the state in former British North Borneo and in contemporary Sabah, Malaysia.
In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Doolittle brings extensive experience from decades of service as a board member for various educational nonprofit organizations in New Haven.