You can find some of my published work at Environmental Politics or Land Use Policy, view my cv, follow me on twitter, or drop me a message: livio.silva@graduateinstitute.ch
During the academic year 2023-4, I'll be visiting LSE's Department of Methodology.
All pictures in the website are from fieldwork in the Atlantic or Amazon Rainforest.
About
Hello! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. My research agenda lies at the intersection of Environmental, Political-historical, and Economic Sociologies. Conceptually, I’m interested in how climate and redistributive policies emerge, gain support, and are contested in global and comparative perspective. Methodologically, I rely on various qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods such as in-depth interviews, surveys, text-as-data, and web-scrapping, among others.
My dissertation and book project, entitled “The Amazon as a Carbon Sink: how transnationalism makes and brakes climate change policy in Rainforest States?”, explores the transnational and domestic origins of state capacity in climate mitigation. My project relies on (i) in-depth interviews with policy and scientific elites, (ii) extensive archival work, and (iii) diverse environmental datasets (budgets, fines, protected-area creation, personnel), to tell the story of how we learned to combat deforestation in the Amazon from 1985 to 2022.
I also work for Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva, in a Swiss National Science Foundation sponsored project entitled "Fear and Trust in Unequal Democracies: Elites and the Politics of Redistribution in the Global South" . In this project, we inquire how elites shape the politics of redistribution through two rounds of an original survey with random samples of CEOs, congresspeople, and high-level civil servants in Brazil and South Africa. The results of this research are being transformed in a book manuscript as well as multiple papers.