Dr Simone Schleper (M.S.)

In my research I take an interdisciplinary approach to environmental governance, focusing on the complex relationships between people, animals, and ecosystems. I explore how global organizations, scientific experts, and local communities shape conservation efforts, through the lens of gender and postcolonial critique. 

Using case studies - such as energy infrastructure projects, animal migration, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy - I connect local environmental experiences to larger global systems and policies. My work highlights the value of ground-level perspectives and complements more top-down or technology-driven views of environmental history.

Position: Assistant professor for the global history of science, technology and the environment 

Research topics: Science and politics of nature conservation (esp. 20th and 21st century); environmental discourse and policymaking; (history of) environmental organizations and NGOs; history of ecology; environmental management, monitoring, and expertise; human-wildlife conflicts in the Anthropocene.

Methods: qualitative methods, environmental history and STS (archival research, interviews, oral history)

My research projects:

• (2026-2029) Between field and fora: Non-Western gatekeepers in international environmental policymaking (1960s-1980s) (NWO Veni grant): Since the 1960s, Asian, Latin American, African and Eastern European conservationists working for
  international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) have played important roles in bridging the interests of local communities with international conservation guidelines. Yet, we know very little about the role of these regional representatives in shaping common visions of human-nature
  relationships. The project studies their roles as gatekeepers. It adds their neglected voices to our historical record and contributes to current discussion on how to integrate indigenous knowledge and interests in environmental policy.
• (2023-2025) Intimate Allies: Collaborative Couples, Global Environmental Governance (NWO OCXS grant): This research project investigates environmental governance networks by looking at the collaborative work of two couples who have been at the center of postwar intergovernmental environmental organizations: Juliette and Julian Huxley, and Hanne and Maurice Strong.
• (2019-2022) Animal Migrations, Tracking, Infrastructures (postdoc, part of the Moving Animals project): Two of my recent case studies concerned spatial conflicts between migratory wildebeest and local human communities in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, and mitigation efforts to allow for the migration of North American caribou close to the resource extraction infrastructures of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
• (2012-2017) Environmental Expertise since 1960 (Phd research, part of the Nature's Diplomats project): In my first book I discuss the the failure of a global ecological turn in international environmental organizations that emerged in the postwar period, and the politics of environmental expertise in organizations such as the IUCN, UNESCO, and UNEP.