PhD Thesis
Title: From Participation to Containment: The Ambivalences of Knowledge Co-production in International Organizations
PhD Supervisor and Co-Supervisor: Annabelle Littoz-Monnet and Julie Billaud
Her research examines how international organizations govern through knowledge, with a focus on the ambivalences of co-production. Promoted as a tool to bridge epistemic divides and foster legitimacy, co-production often reinforces hierarchies between technocratic and situated knowledges. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and document analysis, the thesis explores how artifacts, participatory tools, and anticipatory practices shape epistemic politics in global environmental governance. Adopting a reflexive methodological perspective informed by insider–outsider dynamics, it argues that while co-production promises justice and inclusivity, it often depoliticizes contestation and reproduces epistemic hierarchies. These tensions raise critical questions about the possibilities for more plural and transformative forms of global governance.
Profile
Marine Gauthier is a researcher and practitioner with two decades of experience on environmental and climate policies, Indigenous peoples’ rights, gender, and environmental and social safeguards in the UN system and beyond. She worked for over 10 years across Southeast Asia, West Africa, and especially the Congo Basin, where she coordinated stakeholder engagement in initiatives such as REDD+, nature conservation, and climate adaptation programs.
Marine has extensive teaching experience. She has taught advocacy strategies, political communication, and human rights at institutions such as La Sorbonne, and has delivered capacity-building sessions for professionals and students across Europe and Africa. Her academic background spans International Relations, communications, geopolitics, and tropical forest conservation. She is the founder of CAP!, a center supporting activists in advancing social and environmental justice, and the writer of Climate Justice Dispatch.
Publications and Works
- Gauthier, M. (2025). Re-territorializing Climate Governance: The REDD+ Initiatives in the DR Congo. Fourth World Journal 24(2), 91-109. DOI: 10.63428/c7rtt646
- Gauthier, M. (2025). Operationalizing epistemic justice: Participatory 3D Modelling in conservation practice. Academia Environmental Sciences and Sustainability, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadEnvSci7663
- Gauthier, M. (2025). Review of the book Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire by Y. Berda. Allegra Lab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism, Settler Colonialism, Borders, and Empire Series.