Mairon G. Bastos Lima

Mairon G. Bastos Lima is a Senior Research Fellow at SEI Headquarters assessing leverage points and institutional innovations for sustainability transitions in land use, particularly around tropical ecosystems. He focuses on the policy, governance and political dimensions of agri-food systems and commodity supply chains, and collaborates closely with the Transparency for Sustainable Economies (Trase) initiative.

Prior to joining SEI, Mairon worked as a consultant and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University (Netherlands) and the Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). His research has addressed a range of agriculture and land use issues in developing countries as well as at the international level, including leakage in environmental governance, SDGs’ synergies and politics, the expansion of oil palm in Indonesia and soy in Brazil, climate-smart agriculture in Eastern and Southern Africa, and landscape approaches to reconcile forest conservation with rural development in Latin America (Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico).

Mairon is an Earth System Governance fellow and has collaborated over the years with the UNDP and the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on social equity dimensions of sustainability. He has published extensively on inclusiveness, sustainable food security, agriculture & tropical deforestation, renewable energy in the context of rural development, and the bioeconomy.

He holds degrees from the Federal University of Paraná (BSc, 2004), the Federal University of Minas Gerais (post-graduate diploma, 2005), the University of Waterloo (MES, 2008), and the VU University Amsterdam (PhD, 2014).