Marie Gagné
Marie Gagné received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. She previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et culture at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research interests include questions of land access, forest conservation, natural resource management, and agricultural development. More broadly, her work seeks to understand how global economic and political pressures are negotiated and experienced in often unexpected ways in rural locales of Africa. She has published several policy reports, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the African Studies Review and the Journal of Development Studies.
Marie's contributions to her field have been recognised with numerous awards, including the Fraser Taylor Prize from the Canadian Association of African Studies and excellence scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), among others. Since 2021, she has been lending her expertise as a Country Research and Engagement Consultant at the Land Portal, an organization that plays a crucial role in generating and disseminating information on land governance online. Driven by her vision to foster sustainable livelihoods in the Global South, she recently founded her consultancy, the Land and Climate Governance Institute.
Recent publications:
Bélair, Joanny, Linda Engström and Marie Gagné. 2024. “Minding ‘Productive Gaps’: An Appraisal of Non-Operational Land Deals in Seven sub-Saharan African Countries.” Journal of Development Studies.
Gagné, Marie. 2023. A Political Economy Analysis of Conservation in Transboundary Forest Landscapes of West Africa: The Cases of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire. West Africa Biodiversity and Low Emissions Development (WABiLED)/Tetra Tech ARD.
Gagné, Marie. 2022. "Analysing the Constraints to Corporate Land Control: The Influence of Local Power Dynamics on a Large-Scale Land Deal in Senegal." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines no. 56 (2):239-259. doi: 10.1080/00083968.2021.1890628.
Gagné, Marie. 2021. “Corporate Repertoires of Control and Performances of Power in a Contested Land Deal in Senegal.” African Studies Review no. 64 (3):675-703. doi: 10.1017/asr.2021.90.
Gagné, Marie, and Ashley Fent. 2021. “The Faltering Land Rush and the Limits to Extractive Capitalism in Senegal.” In The Transnational Land Rush in Africa: A Decade After the Spike, edited by Logan Cochrane and Nathan Andrews, 55-85. Palgrave Macmillan.