Mahdi Rafati

Research Focus:

• Political Economy of Agricultural Value Chains
• Institutional analysis
• Governance of global value chains (GVCs) and market asymmetries
• Governance of common-pool resources and groundwater
• Agricultural Transformation and Everyday Resistance

Ph.D. Project (working title): "Governing the Saffron Value Chain in Water-Scarce Landscapes: Infrastructural Power, Market Asymmetry, and Water Bankruptcy in Iran"

Brief Profile: Mahdi Rafati is a doctoral candidate in the section of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance (APUG) at the University of Kassel. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Plant Production and Genetics at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran and his Master of Science in Agroecology as part of a joint mobility program between Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and the University of Kassel, funded by an Erasmus+ scholarship. During his master’s studies, he worked for five months as a research intern on the PRIMA-funded BLUMI-Med project within the APUG subproject.

His dissertation examines the institutional and political-economic dynamics of the global saffron value chain. The project analyzes how macro-institutional constraints, state infrastructural power, and market asymmetries shape the local governance of environmental resources—with a particular focus on the interplay of market pressures, stakeholder trust, and everyday forms of resistance in water use in water-scarce regions of Iran.