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 recognized 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.

During her fellowship at the ASCL, Marie will be collaborating with the Collaborative Research Group “Africa in the World - Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections.” She will complete a manuscript on the stalled land reform in Senegal. She will also advance two other papers on the broken promises of a foreign large-scale land deal in Senegal and the impacts of democratic developments on political factionalism in rural areas.