Profile
Marine Gauthier

Marine Gauthier

PhD Researcher in International Relations & Political Science
PhD Affiliate, Gender Centre
linkedin
email
Spoken languages
French, English, Italian
Theme
  • Global Governance
  • Environment and the Anthropocene
  • Development and Cooperation
  • Justice, Equity and Inclusion

PhD Thesis
 

Title: Social and Environmental Standards in Global Governance

PhD Supervisor and Co-Supervisor: Annabelle Littoz-Monnet and Julie Billaud

Her doctoral research examines how international organizations create and apply the social and environmental standards meant to protect people and the environment — and what happens to participation and Indigenous peoples’ rights when they do. Combining ethnography, interviews and document analysis, the thesis focuses on the politics of knowledge these standards rest on: which forms of expertise count, how knowledge is produced and validated, and how safeguard rules shape rights and participation in practice across international, voluntary and climate-finance regimes. It argues that instruments promoted to foster inclusion and legitimacy often reproduce epistemic hierarchies and depoliticize contestation, raising critical questions about the possibilities for more plural and transformative forms of global environmental governance.
 

Profile


Marine Gauthier is a political scientist and PhD candidate at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), with two decades of experience in climate and forest policy, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and social and environmental safeguards. Before returning to academia she served as Senior Technical Advisor on safeguards at UNDP and worked for over a decade across Southeast Asia, West Africa and especially the Congo Basin, coordinating stakeholder engagement in REDD+, conservation and climate-adaptation programmes. She has carried out fieldwork in more than 25 countries.

She has taught human rights, NGO advocacy and political communication at institutions including Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and is the founder of CAP! (Centre d’Accompagnement du Plaidoyer), which trains civil-society organisations on advocacy and safeguards. She is a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and of IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP), and writes The Climate Justice Dispatch.
 

Publications and Works
 

Peer-reviewed articles

  • Gauthier, M. (2025). Re-territorializing Climate Governance: The REDD+ Initiatives in the DR Congo. Fourth World Journal, 24(2), 91–109. DOI
  • Gauthier, M. (2025). Operationalizing Inclusion through Epistemic Justice: Lessons from Participatory 3D Modelling in the Itombwe Nature Reserve. Environmental Sciences and Sustainability. DOI
  • Gauthier, M. (2025). Review of Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire (Y. Berda). Allegra Lab.

Public writing

  • Gauthier, M. (2024). COP après COP, les peuples autochtones sont de plus en plus visibles, mais toujours inaudibles. The Conversation. Read

Personal page & profiles

ResearchGate