Chairholder 2019-2021: Gustavo García López

Dr Gustavo García López

New Prince Claus Chair appointment: ‘Sustainable Development, Inequalities and Environmental Justice’

As of the 1st of September 2019 Dr Gustavo García López will hold the Prince Claus Chair (PCC) for a period of two years at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His thematic focus will be on ‘Sustainable Development, Inequalities and Environmental Justice’.

Gustavo García López is a political scientist from Puerto Rico. He is currently assistant professor in the Graduate School for Planning of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras and will start as a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra in Portugal this autumn.

García López gained his PhD from Indiana University in 2012, where he was a member of Elinor Ostrom’s research group. Ostrom was a Nobel Prize winner (for economics) and an ISS honorary fellow.

Download the CV of Professor Gustavo García López (pdf)

Dr. Diego Andreucci is the Postdoctoral Researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, affiliated with the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity programme. He’s a political ecologist working on social struggles around resource extractivism and climate politics in Latin America and Europe, and a member of the Undisciplined Environments collective.

Diego Andreucci’s research was partly financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of its support for the Prince Claus Chair 2020-2022 (grant no. W 02.24.111).

International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

ISS is an international institute for research and education in the field of development studies. ISS is located in The Hague and is part of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

For more information about the content of the 2019 – 2021 term of the Prince Claus Chair, please contact professor Wil Hout, Professor of Governance and International Political Economy, hout@iss.nl

Andreucci, D. (2022). Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism: By Martín Arboleda London: Verso, 2020, 288 pp.,£ 19.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9781788732963;£ 18.99 (e-book), ISBN: 9781788732987. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2022.2040118

García-López, Gustavo (2021), What kind of climate science for what kind of action? Integrating science, community and culture for climate justiceMTb: Bulletin of the Netherlands Society for Tropical Medicine and International Health, 59(04), 14-15.

Tormos-Aponte, Fernando; García-López, Gustavo; and Painter, Mary Angelica (2021), “Energy inequality and clientelism in the wake of disasters: From colorblind to affirmative power restoration”, Energy Policy, 158, in press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2021.112550

Villamayor-Tomas, Sergio; García-López, Gustavo (2021), “Commons Movements: Old and New Trends in Rural and Urban Contexts”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 46, in press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-102307

Voskoboynik, Daniel, & Andreucci, Diego (2021). Greening extractivism: Environmental discourses and resource governance in the ‘Lithium Triangle’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211006345.

Andreucci, Diego & Zografos, Christos (2021). Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change. Political Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102512

García López, Gustavo (2021) Colonial Climates, Decolonial Futures: Reflections from Puerto Rico. Undisciplined Environments blog, June 22.

Leonardelli, Irene; García López, Gustavo; and Fantini, Emanuele (2021) Commoning through blogging: Reflections on our “Reimagining, remembering and recommoning water” series. Undisciplined Environments blog, May 27. 

García López, Gustavo and Andreucci, Diego (2020) Green New Deal(s): A Resource List for Political Ecologists. Undisciplined Environments blog, July 16.

As holder of the Prince Claus Chair, Professor García López will look into the relationship between Global Social Justice and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He will focus specifically on the global justice component of the SDGs in order to feed into the emerging research agenda on global inequalities and inclusive societies. He will work closely with ISS researchers and with colleagues from other universities in the Netherlands.

Professor García López’ research focuses on understanding the emergence and scaling-up of grassroots commons initiatives, their potential to transform governance towards more equitable and ecological alternatives, and the political-economic barriers they face. He has worked mostly in Mexico and Puerto Rico. At the University of Coimbra, he will be studying how community forestry and climate justice organizations come together at transnational levels to influence international environmental and development policies.

Gustavo García López is also a founding member of JunteGente, a meeting space for organizations seeking alternatives to neoliberal disaster policies in the wake of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. As part of this collective, he is currently working on organizing a civil society gathering on climate justice in Puerto Rico this autumn.