Research fellow in innovation on governance and climate change at the School of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy & Universidad Santo Tomas, Colombia.
Nidia Catherine Gonzalez Pineros work focuses on global environmental politics, local governance and REDD+, the role of innovation and institutional change in developing countries in the current post-2015 negotiating process, with a regional specialism in Latin America. She holds a PhD from the Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany (2005) in Philosophy and Political Science, and a BA from National University of Colombia(2000) in Political Science. She joined University of Bologna in 2014 with 8 years’ experience of academic and policy research in South America and Europe. She is fluent in Italian, German and Spanish, and publish her work in these languages.
Her research interest lies in understanding how local and global environmental governance can bridge to solve trans-national environmental problems, and how strategic resources in developing countries can be used to explore alternative mechanisms of regulation including intergenerational rights and new environmental policy instruments. Much of her recent work also explores how socio-technological innovation and institutional transformations produce and reproduce power relations, boundaries / synergies in the global South with implications for “new earth system governance”. She is interested in the empirical dimensions of these dynamics, especially inter scalar innovation processes.
Her work comprises three principal themes:
- Local governance and NEPI (New Environmental Policy Instrument): limits and opportunities in deriving co-benefits from innovation in policy.
- Design of Innovation and local governance in forest: TEK, Tratidional Ecological knowledge and SNM, Strategic Niches Management.
- Open science and Institutional Challenges for the new millennium: allocation and optimal policy decision-making in forest landscape
Her research works perspective is interdisciplinary and aims to design “science for/with society” and “society making full use of science” for bottom-up solutions facing environmental problems in developing countries.