Gustavo Garcia-Lopez

Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology
Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB)

Research Activites

"Gustavo García López is an environmental policy and politics scholar who studies human-environment interactions through the lens of institutional analysis, common property scholarship, and political ecology. He is especially interested in issues related to community-based natural resource governance, participatory decision-making processes, and environmental movements and conflicts. Currently he is a post-doctoral fellow in the European Network for Political Ecology (ENTITLE) at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). His current work, based on his doctoral dissertation, focuses on the politics and governance of inter-community forestry networks (secondary forest associations) in Durango Mexico. Specifically, he looks at the ecological and socio-economic impacts that these networks have on community-based forest management; and how internal governance characteristics, policies and power relations influence their performance. His previous work has focused on environmental movements and environmental discourses in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, participatory processes and conflicts over soybean expansion in Paraguay and Argentina, disturbances and adaptations in community-based resource management organizations in Indiana (USA), the politics of decentralization and recentralization in Mexico and India, forest governance over time in Indonesia, and the economic valuation of natural resources. Gustavo obtained his PhD. in Public Policy and Political Science at Indiana University-Bloomington, with concentrations in Environmental Policy and Political Theory & Methods (Institutional Analysis). He has a Masters in Environmental Policy (Cambridge University) and a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science and Geography (University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras). His work has been published in the journals Ecological Economics, Ecology and Society and the International Journal of the Commons."