Mehana Blaich Vaughan is as an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, with a joint appointment to Hawaiʻi Sea Grant and Hui ʻĀina Momona. She works with a consortium of scholars who collaborate with Hawaiʻi organizations to develop solutions to environmental management, food security, and sustainability issues. She holds a PhD from the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program for Environment and Research at Stanford University.

Mehana comes from the rural Halele‘a district on the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. For over ten years, she was a middle and high school teacher who worked on developing place-based education programs with local Kaua‘i groups. She has also been involved in a number of local planning efforts, including work related to local stewardship of the environment of Wai‘anae on O‘ahu, in Miloli‘i on the island of Hawai‘i, and on Kaua‘i.

Mehana’s research interests include public efforts to care for the environment at the local level, collaborative management partnerships, contemporary management based on Indigenous systems, participatory research methods, watershed ecology, and place-based education. Her dissertation research focused on collaborative management of a coastal fishery in Hāʻena, Kauaʻi, by government agencies and local residents. She investigated the creation of state law based on customary local management practices, and suggested means of improving initial phases of collaborative management partnerships. She also worked with Hawaiian fishermen to understand local benefits created though sharing of subsistence harvests. Her future research includes:

• Investigating and enhancing local capacity to monitor the well-being and use of ecosystem services, as well as to enforce sustainable harvest practices.
• Documenting stories of local leaders and policy makers in Hawai‘i with decades of collaborative, local-level, environmental management experience whose knowledge of past agreements, land uses, and planning efforts are invaluable.
• Understanding how Hawaiian values and practices related to environmental care and management are being transmitted and changing across generations.
• Investigating effects of land use on coastal fisheries at the ahupuaʻa level.

Mehana is grateful to her children, husband, family, and to all of the Hawai‘i people that have engaged with and informed her work.