Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
Sweden
fellow
Christiaan De Beukelaer
2024-2025
Home institution
University of Melbourne
Country of origin (home institution)
Australia
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology; Political Sciences
Theme(s)
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance; Energy & Renewable Resources; Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity; Public Policies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Christiaan De Beukelaer is a political anthropologist working on power and ideology in global governance.
He trained as a musicologist at the University of Amsterdam before obtaining master’s degrees in both Cultural Studies and Development Studies at the University of Leuven. As part of his doctoral research at the University of Leeds, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Ghana to understand how governments and international organisations began framing music industries as drivers of “development”.
After working with cultural policy for a decade, he now focuses mainly on maritime transport and climate policy. The common thread in his research is an attempt to understand how global governance can be both so dysfunctional and so important for climate justice.
His latest book, Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping (2023), recounts his five months aboard the century-old schooner Avontuur during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The travelogue provides a backdrop to his discussion of the environmental impacts of the shipping industry and the potential of wind propulsion. Upon publication, the Financial Times described it as a “notable new book on climate and the environment.”
De Beukelaer is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a technical advisor to the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport, and an external member of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto.
He grew up in Ghent, where he spent much of his teenage years living on a barge on the River Scheldt.
Research Project
Shipping the Future: Maritime Cargo Transport for a Liveable Planet
In a globalized economy, human life seems scarcely imaginable without maritime transport. Shipping has, both historically and currently, shaped the expansion of global trade. This means that this industry has, at least in theory, the potential to reshape this trade. However, the focus of environmental regulation in the industry remains narrowly focused on greenhouse gas emissions and harm reduction, rather than actively aiming to shape a liveable planet for all. By using “doughnut economics” as a guiding framework, De Beukelaer explores how to balance social needs and environmental constraints to ensure a “safe operating space for humanity,” beyond the narrow regulatory frameworks of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN agency that regulates the industry. The ocean is, after all, a unique space governed by inter-governmental organisations (controlled by nation-states) without being subject to sovereign claims of nation states. Indeed, rather than being a mere extension of sovereign states, the ocean is governed as an extra-territorial global space. It thus holds up a mirror to terrestrial governance. This creates a different set of stakes and possibilities for environmental governance at sea than on land – calling into question methodological nationalism. De Beukelaer therefore asks whether oceanic governance can reframe climate justice on terra firma by delivering global economy that is both just, fair, equitable, and entirely compatible with Earth System Boundaries?
Research Interests:
power and ideology; global governance; cultural policy; maritime cargo; shipping industry; transport; climate change; environment