Editorial Advisory Board

I teach and conduct research on agricultural change in Africa and Asia at the Institute of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (Hans Ruthenberg Institute) at the University of Hohenheim. My research focuses on digitalization, mechanization, climate change and food security. The perspective of young people and women plays an important role here. As a journalist, I write for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In a consulting capacity, I work with the World Bank and the Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

After three decades at the OECD, most recently as Head of the OECD Berlin Centre, I am retired but not retiring. I am a member of the Foundation Board of WWF Germany and a board member of Transparency International Germany. The issues of sustainable rural development have always accompanied me, first in research, then as an advisor to the EU Commission, today as Senior Policy Advisor of Ecologic Institute. Since 2013, I have been moderating the Strategic Monitoring Group for the Special Initiative One World Without Hunger (SEWOH), a multi-stakeholder forum on achieving SDG 2. I am committed to a broad, cross-sectoral, spatial approach to sustainable development and food security.

I would like to contribute topics of resource governance and local as well as global community filter issues to the journal Welternährung. I am an agricultural economist and have studied development policy in depth. Since my PhD thesis and later in my habilitation at the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, I have been dealing with multifaceted governance issues, filiation rights, formal and informal access, use and provision of natural resources. As president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, one focus of my work is on commons research and studies of the successes and failures of the use and provision of commons resources. The scope ranges from classic commons, such as land, pasture, and irrigation water, to new commons filters, such as knowledge and gene pools, to global commons, such as climate change mitigation and food security.

I worked for many years at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in Rome, most recently as Head of the Press Department. After retirement, I returned to my old profession as a journalist and serve on the editorial board of the journal Welternährung. After studying politics at the University of Hamburg and completing a postgraduate course in international relations and trade policy in Amsterdam, I worked for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (Hamburg) and the Tagesspiegel (Berlin).

I am a co-initiator of welternährung.de as a political and technical discussion platform within the framework of Welthungerhilfe's communications. For Welthungerhilfe, I was head of the press department until 2018, then head of the policy department and chair of the German NGO umbrella organization VENRO for four years. After studying political science and economics, I worked for many years at the interface of science, politics and journalism: as a research assistant at the Institut fiir Afrika-Kunde, in the foreign documentation department of Gruner+ Jahr, as an editor at "der Überblick," and later as head of the communications program of the Christian Council of Lesotho and managing director of Germanwatch.

For many years I have been teaching and researching internationally on topics of humanitarian aid and peace and conflict studies - currently at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Institute for Peacekeeping Law and Humanitarian Volker Law (IFVH), as well as at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). As a political scientist with a rather interdisciplinary background, I am primarily concerned with issues of localization, conflict management, and peace enforcement. My regional focus is on Sildasia - although I also work on other countries and regions. A decolonial perspective is as important to me as practical relevance. For many years I was a board member of FIAN Deutschland e.V. and I still wish for a world where people are free from hunger and have access to the resources that enable them to live in wilderness.

On the other side of the Advisory Board, I head the World Food editorial team. As a journalist, I have been writing for 20 years from Berlin on international, foreign economic and development policy issues, among other things as a freelance journalist for welt-sichten, as editor/CvD at Capital and before that in the foreign editorial department of the Financial Times Deutschland. After studying International Relations (LSE/London), I worked as an editor and correspondent in Bonn (AFP), Brussels (dpa) and London (dpa).