On June 18, the Earth and Life Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Carolina Milhorance for a new ELI-Sustainability Talk. 

Abstract

Ecological and food systems transitions have become central to global policy agendas, yet progress remains uneven, contested, and at times reversed. Recent years have made clear that ambitious policy frameworks and increasingly elaborate policy mixes can coexist with persistent implementation gaps, and that hard-won socio-environmental gains can be actively dismantled under shifting political coalitions.

This seminar argues that such trajectories cannot be understood as coordination problems to be solved through better institutional design. Transitions are inherently political processes — complex, contested, and shaped by coalition dynamics, institutional legacies, and asymmetries in resource access. 

Drawing on research in Brazil, with comparative perspectives from other Latin American countries and from Southern and West Africa, the seminar proposes a relational and context-dependent perspective on the politics through which transition pathways are built, blocked, or unmade.

Through cases of climate, water, and land use governance, three threads run across the discussion: how transition policies are built — often gaining authority through situated practices rather than formal design; how their politicization can take troubling forms, including polarization, active dismantling, and democratic backsliding; and what enables some policies, transition pathways, and democratic institutions to prove resilient under pressure, while others give way.

The guest

Dr. Carolina Milhorance is a Political Science Researcher at the Center for International Development and Agricultural Research (CIRAD), Environment and Societies Department (ES, Art-Dev Research Unit), and the University of Montpellier. 

Carolina Milhorance has participated in several research and consultancy projects in Latin America, Southern and West Africa. Building on political sociology, network analysis, and extensive field research, her work focuses on topics such as climate policy, environmental governance and conflicts, food and nutritional security, south-south cooperation, international organizations and soft norms, policy transfer and diffusion, and cross-sectoral policy challenges. 

She is the author of the book « New Geographies of Global Policy-Making: South-South Networks and Rural Development Strategies », Routledge.

Practical

This seminar will be held on June 18 from 14:30 to 15:30 in Ocean room (de Serres building, Place Croix du Sud 2, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).

Registration for the talk is appreciated but not required. The registration form will soon be available.

The seminar is free and open to everyone.

The seminar can also be attended online. Follow online here: TEAMS link.