He conducts research in Papua New Guinea on conservation and development, agriculture, water, and language revitalization. He also conducts research on water and agriculture in Canada and the United States, in the Okanagan Valley and the Columbia River Basin. He has published on common property issues in the Pacific, as lead guest editor of Customs, Commons, Property and Ecology, a special edition of Human Organization (2007), and on water as a commons in a 2012 publication in Current Anthropology 53(5): 617-641. Most recently he has published an edited volume with Berghahn Press entitled The Social Life of Water (2013).