Welcome to our guest researchers

The Section of International Agricultural Policy and Environmental Governance is glad to welcome three guest researchers to the University of Kassel for their research stays.

Fekadu Beyene Kenee is a full professor of Institutional and Resource Economics, and an employee at Haramaya University in Ethiopia. His research areas include collective actions, institutional and policy analysis; natural resource governance; and third, livelihoods, conflict analysis and peacebuilding. During his stay, he will co-teach the MSc course 'Critical and Collective Perspectives on Global Food Systems' as part of the AGES Master program. He will stay with us until November 29.

Mailén Nicanoff is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, and a doctoral fellow at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Her research focuses on food sovereignty and agricultural production in Indigenous communities in the Salta Chaco, Argentina. Her research stay at the University of Kassel is supported by a DAAD Research Grant.

Xiao Liu is a PhD candidate in Land Resource Management at Zhejiang University. Her primary research field is land resource management, with a particular focus on forest resource management and governance. In her PhD, she examines the governance of collective forest resource assets in China, focusing on property rights restructuring, institutional provision by local governments, and mechanisms for forest resource value realization in the context of China's ongoing collective forest tenure reform. Her research is grounded in New Institutional Economics and draws on property rights theory, transaction cost economics, polycentric governance, and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework.