People

The International Forest Policy Research Group consists of members with a wide range of research interests.

Read more about profiles of individual group members below.

Maria Brockhaus, Professor

Maria Brockhaus is Professor of International Forest Policy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, since November 2016. Her background is in forest and environmental policy and agricultural economy.

In her research, she focusses on questions of political economy, policy change, and policy networks. A large part of her research is concerned with forests’ role in climate change mitigation and adaptation at the interfaces of research-development, and economics-policy in anglo- and francophone countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Before she joined the University of Helsinki, she was a Senior Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) where she had been leading the policy component in CIFOR's Global Comparative Study (GCS) on REDD+ since 2009. Understanding what enables (and hinders) transformational change in and beyond the forestry sector is truly fascinating to her - especially when dissecting politics and power in highly contested policy arenas.

Ayonghe Akonwi, Postdoc researcher

Ayonghe Akonwi is a post doctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS). His research in HELSUS examines present sustainability challenges and desired futures in the governance of Nordic forests, using Ernest Callenbach’s ‘ecotopia’. The concept advocates for a near utopian society that is socially and ecologically balanced. He has previously worked on expressions of power, agency, and resilience among people impacted by state-led systems for the resource management of Protected Forests in Sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, his work in the GreenPole project pursued interdisciplinary assessments of forest policy outcomes (climate, biodiversity, and wider societal impacts), which he performed in consortium with colleagues at Lund University, Copenhagen University, and the University of Helsinki. Other areas of sharing interest include anthropological inquiry, qualitative methods, and interdisciplinary theories (Power, Agency, and Cultural Resilience).

Hannah Ehrlichmann, Doctoral researcher

Hannah Ehrlichmann is a doctoral researcher in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences (DENVI) program at the University of Helsinki. She has a master's degree in Forestry Science as part of the Environmental Change and Global Sustainability (ECGS) masters program from the University of Helsinki and a bachelor's degree in International Relations from the University of Leiden, specializing with a Minor in Economics and Sustainability.

Her research is focused on examining colonial legacies in the German and Cameroonian forest sector by analyzing forestry related flows between the two countries from 1884 until 2022, using historical data. Further, she looks at the financial actor structures reproducing colonial relations through analysis of company structures and networks. Her work is contributing to the ForEqual and FairFrontiers project by aiming to unpack the historical inequalities persisting in trade and institutional path dependencies sustaining them.

Simon Fleckenstein, Doctoral researcher

Simon Fleckenstein is a doctoral researcher at the department of Forest and Environmental Policy at the University of Freiburg in Germany and an affiliated member of the International Forest Policy research group of the University of Helsinki. He holds a MSc double-degree in Forestry and Agriculture from the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Lleida in Spain.

His research interests lie in the politics of forest and related land-use sectors within the multi-level policy system of the European Union and beyond. Simon's current research is embedded in the Horizon 2020 SUPERB project, where he analyzes cross-sectoral policy trade-offs and synergies for transformative change toward forest restoration and adaptation across political levels and among different European Member States.

Previously he worked in departmental research for the Federal Ministry for Food and Agriculture in Germany.

Felicity Goldsmith, MSc

Felicity Goldsmith is a recent graduate from the Environmental Change and Global Sustainability master's programme at the University of Helsinki. Her disciplinary background is in Geography, with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Exeter.

Contributing to both the ForEqual and FairFrontiers Projects, Felicity is currently developing a paper from her master's thesis. Using archival resources, she is undertaking critical discourse analysis of British business media in the context of Cameroon's land, forest and plantations. Her specific focus is on indigenous representation, exploring how British business media represents and legitimises the treatment of indigenous peoples in Cameroon's forestry sector, and how this has evolved through time (pre, during, and post direct colonial power). By analysing these framings, Felicity's research aims to deconstruct and understand the inequalities, narratives and power dynamics that persist within Cameroon’s present forestry and land sectors.

Teemu Harrinkari, Doctoral researcher

Teemu Harrinkari is a doctoral student in Sustainable use of Renewable Natural Resources (AGFOREE) program at the University of Helsinki. He holds a master's degree in forest economics (University of Helsinki) and has studied finance at the Aalto University School of Business.

His doctoral dissertation deals with the diffusion of international influences on national level, using Finland as a case study. His current research interests include the international and European forest policy domains, Finnish forest policy subsystem and the development of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and the Four pathways of international influences.

Félicien Kengoum Djiegni, Doctoral researcher

Félicien Kengoum Djiegni is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki within the Doctoral Programme in Sustainable Use of Renewable Natural Resources (AGFOREE). He holds a master’s degree in international environmental law and a master’s degree in international business law.

His work falls within the scope of the Global Comparative Study on REDD (GCS-REDD) implemented by the Center for International forestry research (CIFOR). His research uses Policy Network analysis to look at the politics of forest and climate change, investigating in particular the outcomes of policy cooperation in the Global South, namely in the DRC. It also compares across multiple countries (Indonesia, Vietnam, and Brazil) engaged in reducing their emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) to understand what structural conditions of the policy domain enable desired policy change.

Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki, Adjunct professor

Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki is an adjunct professor in environmental policy based in Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS). She also has a background as a tropical forester.  Kaisa’s research interests are in climate and forest policies, science-policy interface, policy experiments, sustainability transformation and multilevel governance. She has been working in the University of Helsinki for 15 years as well as being associated to Cifor’s climate and forest policy research for several years. She has published several peer-reviewed papers.

Eveliina Koskinen, Research Assistant

Eveliina Koskinen is a Master's student of Environmental Change and Global Sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Her expertise combines land-use questions, environmental policy and development studies. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Helsinki.

As a research assistant, Eveliina is contributing to the ForEqual and FairFrontiers Projects of the University of Helsinki and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), in collaboration with the Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Sustainable development in Southern and Central Africa (CERIDAC). Her work focuses on the Law No. 22/030 on the protection and promotion of the rights of Indigenous Pygmy peoples in the DRC.

Chenmei Li, Doctoral researcher

 

Chenmei Li is a doctoral researcher and she works as part of a research consortium "The forestry sector as an inequality machine? Agents, agreements and global politics of trade and investment in the Congo Basin", where she look at how China-Africa trade and investment relation in forest interacts with social inequalities. Previously, she worked at Peking University of China as project specialist on Chinese international engagement particularly with Africa and Central Asia. She obtained her master degree from International Institute of Social Science, Erasmus University Rotterdam for economic of development. 

Niina Pietarinen, Doctoral researcher

Niina Pietarinen is a doctoral researcher in the Sustainable use of Renewable Natural Resources (AGFOREE) program at the University of Helsinki.

She has a master's degree in Forest Bioeconomy and Policy from the University of Helsinki and a bachelor's degree in International Business, Marketing and Management from Karelia University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on Finnish and EU forest-related policies and the implications of those to sustainability framings and financialization of forest sector by applying a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. She has also investigated REDD+ and other conflicting interests in forest domain in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as narratives put forward by scientific literature about the causes of deforestation in DRC and Cameroon.

She is a member of ForEqual, FairFrontiers, and GreenPole projects and has worked with the European Forest Institute (EFI) and Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR). 

Elina Savolainen, MSc

 

Elina Savolainen has recently graduated and holds a master's degree in Forest Science from the Environmental Change and Global Sustainability (ECGS) master’s program from the University of Helsinki. In her work, she applies Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and currently works on applications of the QCA method to the FOREQUAL project and assessing the effectiveness of forest and climate mitigation policies (e.g. REDD+) in halting deforestation. She did her internship in the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), based in Bogor, Indonesia, and the data she manages was collected under FOREQUAL, CIFOR´s Global Comparative Study on REDD (GCS-REDD) and as part of her Master thesis research.

Alizée Ville, Doctoral researcher

 

Alizée Ville is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki.

Within the ForEqual project, she is investigating the inequalities born from current and historical trade flows in the forestry sector of the Congo Basin - more specifically in Cameroon and DRC. She previously worked for the Stockholm Resilience Center (Sweden), where her work focused on the intersection between gender and forest policy in Sweden. She holds a Master’s degree of Development Studies with a focus on Agricultural development and Economic policies from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), where her thesis “Trade-offs between wood harvest and forest carbon stocks: The case of Japan” studied the economic and ecological benefits for Japan to harvest it’s own wood rather than importing it, in a changing global market.

- Affiliated members -
Sandrine Andong, Visiting doctoral researcher

Sandrine Andong is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of International Relations of Cameroun of the University of Yaoundé 2 (IRIC-UY2) in Cameroon, within the ForEqual project. She investigates the North-South inequalities generated by the international forest policy instruments in the Congo basin. She is a Master degree holder in International Relations from IRIC-UY2. Her Master thesis was about the socio-anthropologic evaluation of the contribution of the VPA-FLEGT process to Cameroon’s strategy of forest sustainable management. Earlier, she studied fundamental private law at the University of Yaoundé 2. As a researcher, her field is on the North-South power relation within the forest governance field in the Congo basin.

Mawa Karambiri, Visiting scientist

Dr. Mawa Karambiri has a background in Sociology. She is a visiting scholar in the Chair of International Forest Policy at the University of Helsinki where she participates in teaching activities and supervision of students. Since July 2021, she works for the World Agroforestry Centre (CIFOR-ICRAF) as policy and technical engagement specialist for the Sahel in the Regreening Africa project. She is currently based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Before joining CIFOR-ICRAF, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, where she also completed her PhD degree in Forest Sciences. Her research interests concern gender and inequality studies, forest governance, land restoration and local democracy.

Roger Mbuyu Kimpesa Kasulo, Visiting doctoral researcher

Roger Mbuyu Kimpesa Kasulo is a doctoral researcher in International Public Law at Faculty of Law of the the University of Kinshasa (UNKIN). Assistant at the Department of Environmental Law and Sustainable Development, he is also  researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Human Rights in Central Africa (CRIDHAC).

Within Forequal project, he focuses his research on inequalities in the national and international legal framework for forest governance in the Congo Basin, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon. He analyses the production and reproduction of inequalities in the legal framework from the colonial period to the present day.

Roger holds a bachelor in Public Law from UNKIN and a master's degree in International Development Stduies from Hankuk University of Foreign Study (HUFS) in Seoul, Republic of Korea. He has over 10 years' experience in managing development projects and civic and environmental education, having worked in government agencies and national and international NGOs.

Maria Ojanen, Visiting scientist

Maria Ojanen is a current visiting scholar and a former doctoral student in International Forest Policy Group. She defended her thesis ‘ How to generate and share evidence effectively? Comparing evidence syntheses and exploring scientists’ challenges in environmental science-policy interfaces ’ in 2022. The thesis focused on the ability of knowledge synthesis to provide credible, relevant and legitimate evidence in a contested natural resource governance topic, namely: what are the environmental impacts of different property rights regimes. Further, the thesis assessed the challenges and risks that scientists faced when seeking to inform policy-making in diverse forest related science-policy interfaces.

Maria currently works as a Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Environmental Institute (SYKE). Her ongoing research projects build on transdisciplinary research, with the emphasis on assessing and experimenting with diverse knowledge co-production processes in contested policy topics. To find out more about her work, please visit Maria’s SYKE profile.

Jenniver Sehring, Visiting scientist

Jenniver Sehring is a Visiting Scientist at the University of Helsinki with the International Forest Policy Research group. As a Political Scientist she focusses on natural resources management, Central Asia and comparative research. After several years in academia, she has been working as an adviser and consultant in the field of international environmental politics for the OSCE, the Council of the European Union, the German Foreign Office, and the GIZ. While her focus is on water governance and cooperation, she has been involved in international forest policy research since 2011, mainly through her association to the Global Comparative Study on REDD+ and advising on comparative research methods.

Natalya Yakusheva, Visiting scientist

Natalya Yakusheva was a postdoc in International Forest Policy. Natalya received her PhD in Environmental Science from Södertörn University, Sweden. In her thesis, she explored key challenges and opportunities of multi-level governance (MLG) of nature conservation in a context of post-socialist legacies and Europeanization on the examples of two transboundary national parks in the Carpathian Mountains between Poland and Slovakia.

Natalya’s research focuses on various aspects related to the European Forest Policy and decision-making. She is particularly interested in understanding how different actors engage in multi-level forest governance, what their motivations are and how existing power asymmetries influence such governance networks. She looks at various aspects of interests’ representation in the EU LULUCF negotiations, and how this links to accountability within the EU MLG.  Finally, she is interested in how perceptions of equity shape (or not) the EU forest governance.   

Cecilia Luttrell, Visiting scientist

Dr. Cecilia Luttrell works as an independent consultant. In addition, she a Senior Associate to the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) as well as the Dala Institute and Capability Oy. At CIFOR she has been involved in developing governance analysis and impact assessment of national and local-level implementation around the oil palm, REDD+ and illegal logging arenas. She has experience in monitoring and evaluation, most recently leading the learning review of an evaluation of CIFOR's oil palm research in Indonesia and the research and learning component of the evaluation of the DFID funded Making All Voices Count programme (and the Indonesian case studies). Cecilia holds a BA in Geography, an MSc in Forestry, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences, with research centered on institutional change, aquaculture, and access to natural resources and livelihoods in Vietnam. She has worked in multiple countries in Asia and Africa, with longer periods in Indonesia, Ghana, and Vietnam.

- Former members -
Christopher Eichhorn, MSc

Christopher Eichhorn  previously collaborated with International Forest Policy Group in the framework of his master thesis that focused on the consequences of restoration policies and projects in Colombia on the reduction of deforestation, specifically on the aims of REDD+.

Dangui Li, Doctoral researcher

Dangui Li is a doctoral researcher in International Forest Policy. Dangui completed her Master degree in Sociology of Development at Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands. In her master thesis she explored  how the social life in rural China has evolved over years under the impact of processes of urbanization.

Sabrina Rosa, MSc

Sabrina Rosa graduated from the Master program in Forest Bioeconomy Business and Policy at the University of Helsinki. Her background is in biology and she holds a Ph.D. in Life Sciences from the University of Brussels.

Her master’s thesis focused on the characterization of private forest owners in the Italian Alps. More specifically, her thesis investigated how they perceive forest management and their role as forest owners in the context of stewardship of natural resources, and what may be the implications for the design of policy instruments aiming for a more active management.

Hanna-Kaisa Sainio, MSc

Hanna-Kaisa Sainio is a graduate from the Master’s Programme in Area and Cultural Studies with regional focus on Latin America at the University of Helsinki. She holds a Bachelor of Latin American Studies and Portuguese from Stockholm University and a Bachelor of Business & Administration with a specialization in tourism from (Haaga-) Helia University of Applied Sciences, Porvoo. Her experience in Latin America is mainly from the Brazilian context, and her interests include e.g. environmental humanities and sustainability, indigenous studies, CSR and values in decision-making (her Bachelor’s thesis topic), inclusion and diversity. Framing and inclusion were the main themes in her Master’s thesis about sustainability in the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement.