Judith Krauss

Judith Krauss is a lecturer at the University of York’s Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC), teaching on the BA in Global Development programme. Her research interests focus on the political ecology of nature-based value chains, decoloniality and justice in conservation, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).         

At the University of Sheffield, Judith worked on the CONVIVA - convivial conservation research project with natural and social-science colleagues at the Universities of Sao Paulo (BR), Helsinki (FI), Wageningen (NL), Dodoma (TZ) and Santa Barbara (US) focusing on lions in Tanzania, wolves in Finland, jaguars in Brazil and bears in California. This has resulted in a collective special section in Conservation and Society and an interest in justice and decoloniality especially in the SDGs (goal 15, life on land in Globalizations, convivial conservation and decolonising in Journal of Political Ecology, a decolonial analysis of five SDGs with Andrea Jiménez and Marina Requena in Sustainability Science). 

She was part of the 'Livelihood impacts of coping with Covid in rural Mozambique' project, which traced how Covid exacerbated existing vulnerabilities and created new exposures (published with colleagues at the Universities of Edinburgh and Eduardo Mondlane and the Micaia Foundation in World Development). 

For her PhD, Judith investigated the environmental dimension of cocoa sustainability initiatives in Latin America through a Global Production Networks lens, highlighting divergent priorities across socio-economic, environmental and commercial dimensions (with Aarti Krishnan, Global Networks) and abiding power asymmetries in the cocoa sector (with Stephanie Barrientos, Geoforum).

Before her PhD, Judith worked in civil-society, public-sector and private-sector organisations in Europe and North Africa, including German development cooperation, World Bank, IIED and the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Judith is passionate about knowledge exchange and public engagement, having worked on convivial conservation, flying-less, value chains and cocoa sustainability, including through research storytelling.