CLAUDIA HORN

I am a scholar of socioenvironmental politics with a disciplinary grounding in the social sciences. My research, teaching, and policy work address issues of structural inequality, global development, and environmental change. My research agenda explores the histories and political economies of environmental governance at international, national, and local scales and how they shape power relations over access to resources and exposure to environmental risks in urban and rural settings. This agenda is driven by several questions: What are the mechanisms, actors, and institutions that reproduce and perpetuate the exploration of nature and people in global peripheries, including under the premise of climate action? How can historical and multiscalar analysis of these forces guide effective climate action towards sustainable policies and greater socio-environmental justice?

Currently, I am Madeleine Haas Russell Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Crisis, Risks, and Responses at the Department of Environmental Studies and the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program at Brandeis University, MA, US. I am writing my first book State Agents of the Green Economy, which looks at the geopolitics of international green finance. I am teaching Environmental Politics in Latin America and The Political Economy of Global Climate Governance.

I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Kathryn Hochstetler and Professor Jude Howell at the International Development Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  My dissertation examined the environmental cooperation between Brazil, G7 donors, and the World Bank. Analyzing Amazon rainforest aid since 1992, from the Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7) to the Amazon Fund, the dissertation examines the social and territorial effects of different initiatives, including market-based forest conservation, environmental management approaches, and technologies.

For the last five years, I have been based in Belém (in the Amazon state of Pará), Brazil, which will host the Climate Summit (COP30) in 2025. There I worked at the city government's (PSOL, Socialism and Freedom Party) Secretariat of Planning, and with social movements and unions on issues including land conflicts, agrarian reform, mining, export logistics, energy, extractivism, and trade agreements (EU-Mercosur).

I hold an M.A. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, New York City, where I worked on transnational public spheres and social movements from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. I also hold an M.A. from the Technical University Dresden, where I wrote a thesis on neoliberal management reforms in multilateral and bilateral development agencies.  

Before starting my dissertation at LSE, I worked as a Project Manager United Nations and the Global South at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung - New York Office, managing programs at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) and the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) amongst others, and in partnership with universities, international civil society activists, and organizations.  

CV here.