Profile
Livio Silva-Müller

Livio SILVA-MÜLLER

PhD Researcher in Anthropology and Sociology
Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy
Spoken languages
Portuguese, English, German, French
Areas of expertise
  • Environmental Sociology
  • Economic Sociology
  • Inequality
  • Transnationalism
  • Computational Social Sciences
Geographical Region of Expertise
  • Latin America

PHD THESIS


Co-Supervisors: Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva & Prof. Grégoire Mallard

Expected Completion:  2024/2025

 

Profile

 

My dissertation project, entitled “The Amazon as a Carbon Sink: how transnationalism makes and brakes climate mitigation in Rainforest States?”, explores the transnational and domestic origins of effective climate mitigation in Rainforest States. This project relies on (i) in-depth interviews with policy elites, (ii) a novel grant-level dataset on the financial income of diverse policy organisations scrapped from multiple sources, and (iii) archival work to process-trace the emergence and dismantling of deforestation policies in Brazil from 1985 to 2022. Empirically, I demonstrate how effective climate mitigation policy in Brazil was triggered by a group of transnationally connected technocrats, who had developed policy solutions for climate change outside the state. They exploited a unique opportunity to implement these policies unilaterally, leading to a organisation of rural elites in Brazil. Theoretically, I combine political economy and sociology to provide a theory of climate regimes in the Rainforest States. My theory posits four ideal types of climate regimes depending on (i) the strength of transnational environmental policy networks within government and (ii) the elite support and mobilisation of opposing coalitions.

 

ACADEMIC WORK EXPERIENCE

 

Lecturing

Together with Henrique Sposito, I designed and lectured Fundamentals of R, which is a gentle introduction to R programming for social scientists and practitioners. The course has been offered for IHEID’s graduate students (MINT338) as well as a summer school.

Research Assistantship

I am a research assistant at the Elites & Inequality project, led by Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva. In this project, we contribute to the debate about elites and inequality by shifting the focus from how elites benefit from inequality to how elites may support redistributive policies in Brazil and South Africa. Combining novel survey data and in-depth interviews with elites (CEOs, parliamentarians, and top civil servants), we (1) estimate the average effects of perception on elite support for redistribution and (2) identify the cultural processes that enable this support.

 

Fellowships, grants and awards
 

  • Swiss Leading House for the Latin American Region- Early Career Grant (2023)
  • SNIS International Organization Research Stipend (2021)
  • Davis Projects for Peace Grant (2018)
  • Japan Student Services Organization Scholarship (2015)
     

 

Relevant Publications and Works
 

 

PERSONAL PAGES

 

www.silvamuller.com