Christiaan De Beukelaer

Senior Lecturer in Culture & Climate, University of Melbourne Email:

Christiaan De Beukelaer is a Senior Lecturer in Culture & Climate at the University of Melbourne and Marie Skłodowska-Curie – FIAS-FP COFUND Fellow in Necessary Utopias at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille Université.

Throughout his career as an anthropologist of policy, Christiaan has tried to understand how power and ideology influence governance and regulation. After working on cultural policy for a decade, he changed tack to help address the climate crisis and rethink the future of maritime transport by focusing on climate policy instead. The constant throughout his research is an attempt to understand how the United Nations can be simultaneously a dysfunctional group of agencies and an organisation vital to a flourishing environment and human dignity in the face of an existential planetary climate crisis.

His current research projects include Shipping in the Oceanic Commons: Regulation and Prefiguration (ClimateWorks Foundation) and UNESCO and the Making of Global Cultural Policy (Australian Research Council). His most recent book Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping, published by Manchester University Press, is also available in French translation as Cargo à Voile: Une Aventure Militante pour un Transport Maritime Durable, published by Éditions Apogée. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Read more of his work at AnthropoSea on Substack.