Christiaan De Beukelaer

Global Horizons Senior Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Lecturer in Culture and Climate, University of Melbourne

Christiaan De Beukelaer is a political anthropologist working on power and ideology in global governance.
At the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study he will work on the project Shipping the Future: Maritime
Cargo Transport for a Liveable Planet.

He trained as a musicologist at the University of Amsterdam before obtaining master’s degrees in both
Cultural Studies and Development Studies at the University of Leuven. As part of his doctoral research
at the University of Leeds, he conducted extensive fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Ghana to understand
how governments and international organisations began framing music industries as drivers of “develop-
ment”.

After working with cultural policy for a decade, he now focuses mainly on maritime transport and climate
policy. The common thread in his research is an attempt to understand how global governance can be both
so dysfunctional and so important for climate justice.

His latest book, Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping (2023), recounts his five
months aboard the century-old schooner Avontuur during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The travelogue provides a backdrop to his discussion of the environmental impacts of the shipping
industry and the potential of wind propulsion. Upon publication, the Financial Times described it as a
“notable new book on climate and the environment.”

De Beukelaer is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a technical advisor to the Micronesian Center
for Sustainable Transport, and an external member of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and
Sustainability at the University of Toronto.

He grew up in Ghent, where he spent much of his teenage years living on a barge on the River Scheldt.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.