I am from Piura (Peru) and I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. I received a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC).

I study how excluded groups participate in politics in highly unequal societies, from indigenous and campesino communities to informal traders and small-scale miners. I am interested in their capacity to influence policy outcomes in resource governance and more generally, their impact on state development in Latin America. My book project, “Under(mining) State Authority: The Politics of Informal Gold Mining in Bolivia and Peru”, looks at the expansion of informal governance systems around gold mining in marginalized areas and the new political enforcement dynamics that emerge from the empowerment of the informal extractive sector.

My current projects turn the attention to subnational officials and how they resolve governance dilemmas posed by the divergent interests of the central state and those of their local constituents. I am also coordinating the Mobilization, Extractivism, and Government Action (MEGA) research group.

Outside of academia, I worked with policy makers and communities in program monitoring in the areas of resource governance and sustainability. I managed projects in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador with supply-chain studies and assessments of training programs for the formalization of small-scale gold mining. I also designed models for coexistence between large and small-scale mining.

In the past, I led an organization for the defense of children’s rights in Peru for more than five years.

I hold a B.A. (licenciatura) in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and an M.A. in Political Science from Carleton University.